Category Archives: viewing

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.

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advertising, broadcasting, planning, viewing

Conventional blinkering; how Visa’s Mystery Box was closed too soon

back in January I posted on JJ Abrams idea of Mystery Boxes; that the intentional withholding of information is much more engaging than giving someone the whole story… that sometimes mystery is more important than
knowledge.  I suggested that in comunications planning we’re too obsessed with giving consumers
information and resolution…  instead we need to more often give them some questions, some
intrigue.

I was reminded of this thinking recently when I caught the above ad for Visa.  it opens with a big fat mystery box; a panicked guy running naked thru a desert.  how come he’s there?  why’s he naked?  where’s he running to?  lots of questions… which in short mean you keep on watching the ad.

it’s a great ad, but it could have been a lot braver with it’s media…  why did they have to give the whole thing away in 30 seconds?  they could have top and tailed it – extending the mystery box across the ad break or even across a whole TV show.  and if they’d been really brave, they could have teased the ad for a week without showing the resolution.

by resolving the mystery box so soon, Visa have missed out on sparking a multitude of conversations, roughly around the theme of "why’s man running naked thru the desert with nothing but a Visa card?"

a great ad which missed out on being a brilliant piece of
communication because it played to the conventions of a TV spot…  conventions are there for a reason, but sometimes they’re there to be broken…

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

One In / One Out in Broadcasting UGC

Bbc_threeit’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.

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broadcasting, viewing

Smart Commissioning pays off for ITV

Echo_beach
ITV won a 21% share last night for both of its new Thursday evening offerings Moving Wallpaper and Echo Beach.

much has been written already – both good and bad – about the duo of commissions, with negative comment generally focusing on the quality of the scripts across both.

but I’m not so sure thats such a bad thing…  bad TV has a long and illustrious history – some of us just about remember Carol Burnett battling in a raisin power struggle in Fresno…  and Sunset Beach’s was doing real time playout a decade before anyone had heard of Jack Bauer.  bad TV can be good if it’s knowing, and Echo Beach and it’s partner are both very knowing…

but the real triumph is a very smart bit of commissioning from ITV…  there aren’t many precedents of programmes that have been imagined in such a way, with spin-offs or sequels generally being an extension of a successful (or ailing) existing entity.  it’s a brave concept that could have been killed-off so many times in development, so kudos to ITV (and Kudos for that matter) for pulling it off.

it’s a shame that an advertiser wasn’t able to capitalise on the opportunity to reflect and play with two different sides of a brand personality.  the opportunity to do so remains open…

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advertising, planning, viewing

BBC’s Best and Worst on Show at the Cinema

Doctor_voyage_of_damnedgot to the cinema super early this week and was delivered two bits of commerciality from the BBC.

the first was audio for the Chris Moyles Show, with the man himself chatting to a side-kick as sounds flew around the cinema.  lots of "ooohh, I can make this sound go from left to right, listen…". 

innovative and interesting use of the capabilities of the media channel’s surround sound.

the next was a trailer for the Doctor Who Christmas Special.  the corporation no doubt hopes that Voyage of the Damned, the Tennent / Kylie-fest planned for Christmas Day will be better received by critics than last year’s spiderfest. 

a straight-forward TV trailer then, played in a cinema.

one of these two ads was brilliant, the other was irritating and annoying.  no prizes for guessing which one…

by the time Moyles and co were halfway through, I was ready to personally pull the speakers off the wall.  it was childish and tired; and anyone who thought that playing with sound in a cinema would impress, should check out what Dolby have been doing – consistently and rather elegantly – for years…

the Doctor Who trailer on the other hand was glorious.  seeing it on the big screen did justice to the both the quality of the cast and ambition of the plot and effects.  a simple piece of media planning that put the right communication in the best of places at the right time.

the lessons here is that sometimes less is more.  of the two pieces, the Moyles audio was by far the more customised for it’s environment – it was infinitely smarter; but that didn’t make it better.  by contrast the simple act of trailing a TV show on a big public screen rather than a small personal one, afforded it the credibility of a cinema piece with the anticipation of a movie trailer.  I know which one I’ll be tuning into.

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advertising, branding, viewing

Making Yourself a Merry Little Christmas Ad

I caught this treat of a TV ad last night, and it is – for me – by far and away the best of this year’s Chrimbo crop.  a simple and elegant piece that taps into our collective sense of Christmas spirit.  more celebrities than you know what to do with are on display, but none one of them is trying to sell us groceries or boost their own profile.  rather, they’re all  doing exactly what they do best – laughing, hugging, loving, crying and – in the case of the Grinch – scowling their way through the festive season.

if I had one critisim, it’s that this ad doesn’t need an end line, or a tag line for that matter.  the suggestion that the montage featured movies ‘for the people you love’ is not only implicit, but negates against people drawing their own – and therefore more powerful – conclusions as the what the ad is conveying.  and as for ‘get closer’, well that doesn’t mean anything at all!

but it’s absolutely the right move for HMV, who are never going to compete with the
online retailers on price.  instead they’re reinforcing their
associations with movies, the objective presumably being that over the
next few weeks, as we all negotiate our ways down our respective frenetic
highstreets, we see that Jack Russell and make a detour into it’s store over
others.  time will tell if with this effort HMV manage a Merry little Christmas themselves… I supsect it may just work!

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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.

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content creating, converging, user-generating, viewing

Making Media: Negotiating a Truce in the Broadcast | UGC wars

I caught the above on Faris’ blog as part of a post on read-write culture.  it’s from the brilliant TED, where here Larry Lessig makes the case for a revision of copyright law, in order to negotiate a truce between two sides: on one, the corporations who create original content and seek to protect it in every possible way, and on the other, a new generation of consumer creators who in response are aggressively challenging copyright law and the very nature of copyright itself.

he argues for a private solution that seeks to legalise (and realise the economic potential) of competition between the two sides, and calls for two changes:

1. that artists expect and permit their work to be made more freely available (for example in cases where it’s not for commercial gain)

2. that businesses embrace this opportunity, allowing the ecologies of corporate and consumer creation to co-exist

it’s a theme that any TV channel controller or magazine publisher (and indeed any editor / aggregator of advertiser-funded content) should be familiar with; how to retain a relevant place in the world as audiences fragment not just to other media channels but to content created by other consumers.

but there’s also a clear consequence for advertisers in this evolution.  if consumers (especially younger tech-savvy ones) are essentially disintermediating broadcast channels and sharing content to each other via their participatory networks, then it follows that advertisers and the brand communications they deploy must seek to engage with these new cultural read-writers within the networks.

as far back as 1991, W. Russell Neuman observed that "The new developments in horizontal, user-controlled media that allow the user to amend, reformat, store, copy, forward to others and comment on the flow of ideas do not rule out mass communications.  Quite the contrary, they complement the traditional mass media" (for more see here).  Henry Jenkins in Convergence Culture agrees:

"…convergence culture is highly generative: some ideas spread top down, starting with commercial media … others emerge bottom up from various sites of participatory  culture and getting pulled into the mainstream … The power of grassroots media is that it diversifies; the power of broadcast media is that it amplifies."

smart advertisers will utilise and integrate both grassroots diversity and broadcast media to communicate their brands; not only to fundamentally communicate with both broad aggregations of audience, but more importantly to be full participants in this re-emergence of the re-write culture.

we’ve barely begun to scratch the surface – think about Carphone Warehouse’s sponsorship of the X-factor; which populates their idents (broadcast amplification) with audio clips from viewers (grassroots diversity).  there’s clearly much further to go, but some brands have started.  the question for every other advertiser remains; do you want to participate in the remixed culture or not?  it’s not, when you think about it, a question at all.

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content creating, internet, planning, viewing

Building a Robust Ad Model in the Online Video Space

Msn_video_2 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.

Online_video_market

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
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.
Original_content

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.

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praising, viewing

In praise of, happy birthday and a big thanks …to Channel 4

twenty five years old today, a big happy birthday to Channel 4 …and a big thanks for – in no particular order – Queer as Folk, Chris Morris, Father Ted, Jon Snow, Vic Reeves Big Night Out, Countdown, R O’B & his Crystal Maze, Zig & Zag and The Big Breakfast, Spaced, Treasure Hunt, Friends and many many more.

Media Guardian have assorted a collection of great and good clips here.

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