advertising, broadcasting, content creating, internet, planning, viewing

Two Distribution Models United by a Common Reliance on Creativity

back in Jan of last year I wrote a post outlining five thoughts on viral marketing – which essentially were: what’s the motivation to pass on, is it easy to view and pass on, does it have contemporary relevance and can it be measured? the last of these is now infinitely easier with the announcement of YouTube’s new analytics tool – YouTube Insight.

whilst it’s good to know where in the world people are watching my holiday video, it will no doubt prove more useful in giving ammunition to the arsenals of agencies like Cake, who are responsible for distributing the above piece for Pot Noodle. made by AKQA, it’s a spoof of Guinness’ Tipping Point. and Honda’s Cog for that matter. or actually the Orange ad with those colours …or, come to think of it, a whole tranche of ads that have pretty much been developed on a similar theme ever since Cog’s effort.

what this viral relies on is it’s ability to pop a shot at these more glossy peers. from it’s windy start, thru electric wheelchairs and wheely bins, to a blow up doll and eventually the Pot itself, the piece relies on the ability to remix what is now a very much established theme. it’s creative remix at it’s best. it also voices the suggestion by some of us in the industry who are thinking maybe enough of th Cog-cloning now thanks…

what separates this from Guinness’ original effort is, fundamentally, what a brand wants to get away with… brands are eagerly able to rush in wherever the BACC fear to tread. but it’s also a reflection of money. it’s the level of available investment that determines whether a client adopts Pot Noodle’s viral model or the more investment-intensive broadcast model.

at lower budgets virals frankly are the only option, but it’s not quite that simple… let’s say the above cost £40k to make and – thru free seeding and non-paid for promotion – generates 1 million views. assuming that distribution costs nil, thats a cpt on views of £40.

compare that to a standard TV campaign that will cost – say – £300k to make and generate for the sake of argument an overall cpt (prod and media) for a 16-34 audience of around £20; twice as cost efficient as a viral. but twice as cost effective?! very possibly not…

the viral model is not only pulled rather than pushed content, but benefits from being recommended rather than broadcast to an individual. and when you consider that the above Tipping Pot viral clip has – according to Cake – been on 400 websites, three
national newspapers and on the Sky News viral round up, it’s not surprising that it’s considered to be a success.

ultimately though, each of the above models – whatever the numbers – both fundamentally rely on creativity… on the ability to capture and engage an audience with an idea. doing that gives a brand the luxury of choice in it’s media model. it’s perhaps to all of our detriment that too many brands – through a lack of creativity with their communications – depend only on broadcast communications for their efforts. applying the test of the viral distribution model to more ads would be a sterner test than anything the BACC could throw at them.

thanks to lee@cakegroup.com for the link.

engaging, gaming, internet

Let the AR Game begin!

I’ve wanted to get my teeth into planning a good Alternative Reality Game (ARG) for a while now, so I was interested to see this come my way courtesy of Stew Gurney. it’s an ARG based around the upcoming Olympics in Beijing. what strikes me is how slick this is… very high quality audio-video content and great design of the navigation of the evidence. the whole site can be viewed here.

it will be interesting to see where this one goes… ARGs as a concept, have struggled from a perception of being too niche – capitalising on the Olympics could be a sound strategy to breaking into the mainstream (it would seem that the nature of the interface has been designed with entry-level in mind)…

also I’m clueless as to which brand this is for, or whether it’s for the Olympics itself… but I’m not sure this entirely matters! half the fun will be finding out…

Daniel Terdiman has written a great summary of the initial box of evidence which he received here… let the AR Game begin!

———-

Update: Thanks for Stephen Bedggood for the heads up that this ARG is for McDonalds… great effort on their part… smart and unexpected. it will be interesting to see how and if this translates to any in-restaurant activity come August

internet, social networking, user-generating

Hyped Facebook faces it’s Trough of Disillusionment

according to figures released by Nielsen Online, Facebook saw it’s number of users fall 5% to 8.5 million in January from 8.9 million in December, the first drop in user numbers since July 2006 when Nielsen began compiling data on the site.

many have been quick to announce the beginning of the end for the social networking site. Nic Howell, deputy editor of New Media
Age, has stated that the site is no longer as popular among its core audience of
young people, commenting:

"Social networking is as much about who isn’t on the
site as who is – when Tory MPs and major corporations start profiles on
Facebook, its brand is devalued, driving its core user base into the
arms of newer and more credible alternatives," he said.

there’s no doubt that this exclusivity factor has played a role in the plateauing of Facebook’s usage, and to that I’d add the plethora of requests and forced applications it’s users receive, as well as the hack-handed nature of advertising on the site… in June last year I commented that:

"you can try putting an ad on facebook, but I wouldn’t
recommend it; facebook is a place and space for friends, and a pushed
media impact from a keen brand is an invasion – unless a brand suceeds
in rewarding my just for watching it (for example Virgin Media feeding
me live Big Brother updates, rather than a banner asking me to sign up
now)…" full post here

as could have been predicted, I’ve since then seen more banners on Facebook than at a Mardi Gras parade. but all that aside, does this really mean an inevitable spiral in the popularity of the social networking site? arguably not. we’re perhaps more likely witnessing the third phase of Gartner’s Hype Cycle, the Trough of Disillusionment, in which technologies fail to meet expectations and quickly become unfashionable.
Consequently, the press usually abandons the topic and the technology. sound familiar?

image source: Jeremy Kemp

this would arguably explain why smaller (and relatively newer) social networks continue to see growth – they still find themselves in the post-Trigger growth phase.

so be braced for lots of Facebook and Social networking bashing over the course of 2008. Mediation predicts that plateau will be reached at some point in the future, with a smaller but more loyal user-base at it’s core.

one last plea to advertisers; we are fueling the trough by using Facebook and it’s counterparts for broadcast banner advertising. we need to be better than that… how can a brand’s presence enhance and complement a user experience? if it can’t, it shouldn’t be there.

advertising, branding, engaging, internet, planning

There now follows a simple exercise in Building Brand Associations…

…courtesy of M&Ms. this is quite old now but I just came across it today whilst browsing a post by Jason Oke who writes on the Leo Burnett Toronto blog.

so you’re M&Ms and you want people to know and remember that you have a new product in the form of Dark Chocolate. you could invest in an ad that communicates this and deploy thru relevant and effective media, or

…you could get consumers to find out and then re-enforce (multiple times over) the association for themselves via an online game where you have to find 50 hidden movies – all of which have a ‘dark’ theme.

this is stand out for two reasons. one, only the buffest of movie buffs will know all the answers, so you’re compelled to pass it on and try to work out the answers amongst your mates. it’s very sociably-networkable. which is good.

secondly this little piece stands out for the sheer elegant simplicity with which it has been put together. using flash you navigate your way around the image, zooming in and out as you go. and once you’ve spotted and noted a movie it blacks out, allowing you to focus on the remaining movies you haven’t got yet. infuriatingly addictive and of course very easy to pass on to others to inflict the same brand association building on them.

click here to play but be warned; it’s addictive.

broadcasting, content creating, internet, user-generating, viewing

One In / One Out in Broadcasting UGC

it’s farewell to the blobs as the Beeb unveils a new look for BBC Three. the world has changed a fair bit in the five years since it was rebranded from BBC Choice, and the relaunch – at the heart of which is a philosophy that content will be available anytime, anyplace, anywhere – reflects this new world of 360 degree commissioning as well as UGC vs corporate-generated content.

one of the most intriguing elements is the BBC’s ambition to establish content partnerships in "the places
where our audiences spend time" with the aim of making the channels online presence
"the hub of a vibrant network of conversations across the web" (quoting Smon Nelson as reported by Digital Spy via Broadcast magazine, click here for more). what these places are remains to be seen but Mediation suspects that the likes of Facebook and YouTube may be getting a call soon.

UGC remains for many in TV a topic of the day, and as such the channel will also be calling on viewers to send in clips of themselves introducing
programmes and talking about the channel. get to those webcams!

the announcement comes hot on the heels of the news that MTV is to drop it’s user-generated content channel MTV Flux. no reason seems to have been given but no doubt ratings played a part. there’s an interesting perspective for comms planning and advertising here – namely the importance of channel context…

there are strong embedded expectations of what content you’ll be consuming (and how you’ll be consuming it) when you’re engaged with a particular channel… despite convergence (of content not necessarily hardware remember), watching TV remains fundamentally different from interacting online. not matching these expectations may have been the death knell for Flux as a stand-alone TV channel… the fact that the Flux and it’s community of contributors will live on – integrated into the other channels in the MTV portfolio as well as online – signals that UGC and CGC can sit alongside, but it’s a marriage that has to be carefully managed, a lesson that BBC Three may soon come to learn.

broadcasting, converging, internet, IPA|ED:three, planning, social networking, user-generating, viewing

Darth Vader and The Evolving Ecology of TV

I was shown the above – somewhat delightful – clip at a conference last week. a subsequent forwarding on to a colleague reignited a question I gave pause for thought to a year ago when I asked what is TV? the answer I came to then is the same answer that I stand by now… that TV is the act of consuming aggregated audiovisual content.

I pointed out at the time that this definition implied that, should you run with it, YouTube is television. and I believe it is. in Dec 06 I wrote:

"the aggregation of TV requires content and distribution. technology
has allowed citizens to produce the former, and the internet has
allowed them to do the latter. we are all – should we wish to be –
content aggregators. we are all budding broadcasters. and a
generation is learning to watch TV aggregated by commercial entities as
well as fellow citizens."
mediation post Weds 6th December 06

an obvious question then in all of this is – who is to do the aggregation? …commercial broadcasters or – via PVR on TV / subscriptions on YouTube / wall posts on Facebook – viewers themselves? in negotiating the future of media and communications – the aim of this blog – we have to accept the inevitable conclusion that it is of course both.

in the evolving ecology of TV (in both the broad and narrowcasting sense) the question in not who aggregates, but who – at a given moment in time – we want to aggregate for us. its a question of context… Saturday evening on the sofa is very different to 30mins web surfing on a Friday lunchtime. as a viewer, my individual needs vary massively over the course of a day or week.

commercial broadcasters and internet unilateralists continue to be at war over the issue of who aggregates. the battle is pointless. in the year since I wrote my original ‘what is TV’ post, commercial TV has been under what seems to be continuous fire, not from futurologists predicting their demise, but from a media who have witnessed compromise after compromise of viewer trust.

if broadcast TV thinks it needs to win a perceived war against the internet by cutting corners and taking shortcuts in order to be as popular as possible, then it is fundamentally flawed on two fronts. one; there is no war – both commercial and viewer-aggregated TV are here to stay, and two; the role of commercial broadcasters in this new ecology is not compete with YouTube by being as popular as possible, but to inspire it by being as original as possible…

the role of broadcast TV is to be the source of original, intriguing, inventive, surprising and high-quality content. content that demands to sit alongside it’s online counterparts. as Stephen Poliakoff comments in today’s MediaGuardian, "if you commission it, the viewers do turn up."

…just as millions turned up to see Darth Vader in cinemas in Empire Strikes back in 1980 (and on TV and DVD ever since) …and just as millions have turned up to see the clip at the top of this post. together they’re a great example of this new relationship: content originally produced commercially by Fox and Lucasarts as high-quality content, remixed by DoomBlake for fun, as parody, as art.

both are entertaining, and both have their place in the new TV ecology. it’s notable that DoomBlake’s recreative remix is entertaining because of the original context as defined by Lucas’s commercial creative vision. these content siblings need each other – one as source material, and the other as a way to stay contemporary in a changing world.

advertising, engaging, internet, planning

Missing an Opportunity in the Search for the Golden Domino

I’ve seen this latest Guinness effort a few times since it launched on TV last Thursday. it’s a fantastic piece of advertising, as of course it should be for the £10m price-tag that came attached to it. but according to an article by Stephen Armstrong in today’s Media Guardian;

"By the time the 60-second film broke last week … it had already been pieced together and posted on YouTube by thousands of net users across the world in an enormous online hunt for a golden domino … AMV BBDO gave out the first clue on posters, beer mats and websites two weeks ago. Solving each of the 11 clues released a code that revealed a few more seconds of the commercial, with the first to sling the completed film on to YouTube earning the brewers’ version of Willy Wonka’s ticket."

really!? you could have fooled me. not a jot have I seen of it! which is more than a little disappointing.

the investment behind Guinness’s broadcast media (and a £10m ad) should quite rightly take priority in the mix – but to invest so little behind a genuinely interesting and smart piece of consumer engagement shows at best a lack of confidence, and at worst a distinct case of ‘let’s do the consumer engagement bit’ as an add-on. the fact that – as a thirty year old urban alcohol drinker – I didn’t see the golden domino activity could just be accident; the fact that this activity started a mere two weeks before the ad was first broadcast definitely wasn’t.

a case of smart, very smart, thinking just not backed-up by investment. this should and could have been huge, the fact that it wasn’t (96,000 views to the discussion forum just doesn’t cut it), represents a genuinely missed opportunity.

the same article observes that "alarm is growing in the advertising community over the idea that the net allows clients to pay for an ad in one territory and then reap the benefits for free across the globe". the fact that ‘if I paid £10m for something, I’d feel I had the right to do whatever the hell I liked with it’ aside, one way to combat this threat is to ground the ad into a territory with exactly the kind of comms behaviour that golden domino demonstrates so well…

great ads will for a very long time to come have a key part to play in any communication strategy… but a failure to use them as part of a bigger picture, and more importantly invest in that bigger picture, will only contribute to the spot ad’s woes.

content creating, internet, planning, viewing

Building a Robust Ad Model in the Online Video Space

MSN’s video portal launched recently (source: Microsoft)

having only two days ago posted about how the content / conduit model of consumption is evolving, the good people of MSN yesterday visited citadel Vizeum to tell us about their new online video portal, which can be viewed here.

its a new contender in what’s an increasingly crowded market. just as broadcast channels have grown in number so too has the choice of internet based on-demand channels.

internet-based online channels (source: Microsoft)

it’s a far cry from the days when YouTube, blinkx and Google were battling with bootlegged Mpegs. the market has gone mainstream, and in doing so not only have heritage channel brands (BBC, ITV, Guardian etc) entered the fray, but a wealth of premium content has been made available.

premium content (source: Microsoft)

but the key question for both content creators and conduits in this new market remains – how does the commercial model remain viable?

consumers are proving less and less likely to pay for content – the recent announcement that the New York Times’ pay service TimesSelect has gone free being a case in point – and advertisers (rightly) are increasingly wary of divesting budget into more and more fragmented media channels (or conduits) online.

this is where the MSN video portal feels most accomplished; firstly, not only is the content is of the highest caliber, but it’s seamlessly integrated with a range of advertising spaces, not all of which are the viewing screen itself; on which compulsory ads are viewed in between every few slices of content. in addition a 300 x 240 display ad pops out from the side, and a 300 x 60 sits permanently below the screen.

two observations.

one, it seems that the more things change the more things stay the same. the old contract between viewers and advertisers (where viewers tolerate ads to get the bits they want for free) stands. it turns out the new way of doing things is the old way of doing things; just with new language, different trading models, and – given the proliferation of ‘screens’ – more sophisticated media targeting and selection.

two, your ads sure as hell better be good. as much as the model stays the same, the TV now has a mouse. and whilst as long as brands that make entertaining content will add to the overall experience, a response-orientated insurance add will have people navigating away from the site (let alone the screen) faster than you can say brand response.

of course the increasingly-used alternative to all of this is to bypass the model and make the stuff people want, the content. and again MSN seem have this in hand, talking to – and utilising the experience of – TV production companies about the creation of original content funded by advertisers.

TV Production houses working with Microsoft

so if there is an eventual long-term shift in the business model, it’s most likely to be the move of investment to the producers. interestingly, it could be the Endemols and RDFs of the world that build on their historical income from channels (conduits) with direct income from advertisers and their comms planning agencies. interesting times.

internet, social networking

The Value of Facebook: Knowledge and Power in the Age of Online Accountability

From left to right: Chris DeWolfe, Rupert Murdoch, John Battelle (Credit: Rafe Needleman/CNET Networks)

it turns out I’m worth £160. or to be more precise, what I (and people like me) click on when I’m logged on to Facebook, is worth £160. a bit of number crunching…

Facebook wants to float on the stock-market.
Facebook (what with the overheads of servers, bandwidth and 300+ staff) can’t afford to.

so they need capital investment.
it was today announced that Microsoft have bought a $240m stake in Facebook
a stake (which I calculate = 1.6%) that values Facebook at $15bn (£7.3bn).
I am one of 47 million Facebook users.
I’m worth $15bn valuation / 47m users = $319.
or around £160 (based on $2 : £1 ratio)

I’ve made a big assumption: that most of the value of Facebook is locked into it’s user-base, and – more crucially – what it represents. which seems to be a fair assumption. the high valuation of Facebook certainly isn’t down to the physical assets of the company. but nor is it due to the simple aggregation of it’s 47million-strong global audience.

the value of Facebook is information. not on who or where they are (although thats important). rather its information on what it’s users click on. more numbers I’m afraid:

if the av. Facebook user gets served 6 ads per day,
then each month Facebook serves 47m x 6 x 30 ads.
thats 8.5 billion data points every month.

it’s this data that’s so valuable to Facebook, and to Microsoft should they get their hands on it, because sales operations will use that information to understand who clicks on what, when, and how often. targeting gets better, which improves response rates and efficiency of ad-serving. which given the numbers involved (and Google’s head start in this area) isn’t a bad return on a very minor investment in the company.

as a point of comparison, Maxim USA was recently sold for a rumoured $250m. based on a readership of 16m (source: Dennis publising), that equates to $15.63 (or around £7.80 per user) – around twenty times less the equivelant for my Facebook valuation (£160).

the point of course of all this is that according to a Guardian article Friday October 19th, Facebook is expected to bring in just $150m of revenues, so – assuming all users are equal – I’m generating around £1.60 for the company a year. the fact that in their valuation I’m worth more than one hundred times that, is testimony to the value of data, and the accountability to advertisers that it affords.

	Crafted to Win: Four… on The Engines of Objectivity: Me…
	Martha on What is TV?
	Streaming’s Next Dec… on Streaming’s First Decade: Thre…
	Streaming’s First De… on The Netflix Spark: Why the arr…
	AI vs. AI: Why the R… on Things we never thought we…

MEDIATION

negotiating the future of media and communications

Category Archives: internet