Nitmesh

APA Future of Advertising Forum - Internet Advertising Bureau Talk

Advertising Producers Association Future of Advertising Forum - BAFTA - March 5th 2008

Here's the first video of the APA's conference at BAFTA which drew 170 APA and IPA members eager to learn about the latest advertising trends. The speakers came from different perspectives and their presentations enabled the delegates to contemplate the latest thinking in their own business planning. Speakers included the commercial director of Facebook, leading Executive Creative Directors and Planners, the founder of the innovative advertising for mobiles company, Blyk, experts on trends in advertising on the internet and branded programming.

This is the first of five web videos from the conference and the first being from the IAB given by it's CEO Guy Phillipson where he tells us amongst many other facts that close to 90% of UK homes now have access to broadband and that the UK will be the first major territory in the world where digital adspend will overtake total TV adspend sometime in mid to late 2009. Other talks include Rory Sutherland from Ogilvy, Antti Öhrling Co Founder of Blyk, Marco Rimini Worldwide Head of Communications Planning Mindshare and  John Nolan Head of N.One The Digital And Commercial Division Of North On.

Youth Marketing Presentation and more lovely links

Firstly I found the slideshare presentation on Youth Marketing (at bottom of this post) from the fast forward marketing trend blog. 'Youth is no longer a demographic, it's a mindset'. It's worth a quick view as well as the summary to the  Global Habbo Youth Survey, especially on teens and their favourite mobilephones here. Quoting the summary 'Examines the interests, values, attitudes, online habits of a global audience, the survey reveals teens' current media usage, consumption behaviour and brand preferences in order to better understand what compels youth around the world'

Here's a great story about how text messaging is used for flirting in India. It's from New York Times so you might need to quickly sign up for it to access the story but NYT is always full of great stories.

Here's two great pieces on the meshing of TV and the net. First in the Atlantic Monthly and second in the Timesonline.

This is an amazing site full of futuristic skyscaper designs, fascinating what architects are wanting to build. It's a competition and you have to click on '08 Skyscaper competition'

Synchstep from Pokenyc (explanation here) - This is going to be a killer app for the iphone or itouch (and every other phone for sure) and want it now. An app that synchs your music with your walking pace. Greg Elliott, the designer of it, can safely retire.

Here's a great piece on littleminx.tv. It's a division of RSA Films (where I work). They produced five shorts films from their the directors and there's links here to watch all of them - enjoy - Exquisite Corpse

Lastly my tweetcloud - I love twitter apps. Damiano via punkplanning

 

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Twitter Love

[follow me on twitter]

Hugh Macleod of Gaping Void articulates the strengths of twitter against the other new communication platforms. I always thought it would be the perfect communication tool at a music festival where you could effectively mass text message all your friends at once but I have seen the light and see how it's a platform clearly populated by influencers, social media marketeers. A great platform to spread the day to day but also links of interest. Here's Shel Israel's insightful post on twitter at SXSW.

Here's Twitter in plain english from the wonderful common craft blog.

Marc Ecko - Genius marketing with one baseball

This is marketing genius. Fashion designer/entrepreneur/pop culture maven Marc Ecko, the man who brought us the tagging viral of air force one, has surpassed himself with his latest marketing venture.

'He bid and won Barry Bond's 756th (it's a new record) home run baseball in an online auction costing him $752,467 and now Ecko is giving the American public the chance to decide what to do with it. He has given them three choices and is now at the centre of the biggest sports debate ever.

"I bought this baseball to democratize the debate over what to do with it," Ecko said. "The idea that some of the best athletes in the country are forced to decide between being competitive and staying natural is troubling."

Visitors to Vote756.com can choose between three options:

1. "BESTOW IT" (as is into the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown)

2. "BRAND IT" (with an asterisk before delivering it to the Hall)

3. "BANISH IT" (by sending it into outer space on a rocketship, never to be seen or heard from again)

Every major sports media outlet in the States is reporting this story and will continue to do so. Whatever the public chooses, Ecko will again make news by honouring the results of the vote.

He has successfully written himself into sports history using his bank account and his brain.'

I have to admit to quoting and plagarizing much of the great Fallon Planning blog for this piece but also Joe Jaffe who makes the point that Ecko 'is democratizing the conversation'. 'He talks about the "collective consciousness" (I think I call it the connected consciousness) and the alignment between his brand and what he stands for with this pop culture moment.'

The crucial point, as Crackunit and Fallon point out, is that 750K could have been spent on a conventional marketing campaign but what Ekco has done is priceless in terms of marketing his brand. This is what we should all be doing with all these new forms of marketing. Finding opportunities to seminally reach your core demo audience in a way that they actually care, join a form of communal storytelling, causing a mass debate across all platforms, spilling out into offline (WOM), compelling the public to interact in the final outcome.

or as Ed Cotton of Influx Insights puts it another way when discussing life beyond Consumer Generated Content  'The killer application is finding a way to tap into consumer thinking and creativity through the social network, but to do it in a way that doesn't involve classical advertising.'

Word of Mouth, Rick Rubin and Crisis in the Music Industry

There’s fascinating quick blog post from PSFK summing up the state of the music industry and the way it's marketed and it leads on (I'm still in the middle of reading it) to this long NY Times article about Rick Rubin, the new the boss of Columbia Records but it’s the underlined last paragraph in PSFK post that's interesting.

All the old ad models aren’t working and as I've written in the past, WOM (word of mouth) is coming to the fore. The consumer has to be converted, persuaded or made to enthuse a brand, product or artist, so naturally becoming an evangelist. Putting Rick Rubin in control of a huge record company is an inspired choice but could be quite very dangerous too. Sony have put a true creative in control, and perfectionist by the sound of things, to cause that evangelism for music. Although, as I have said before I don't think it will bring music back to the power it once was. Today there are just too many different forms of (interlinking and meshing) entertainment and technologies for music to compete or blend with. Disposable income is spent on and more spread around than ever before; mobiles, computers, games, DVDs etc.

We need to look at the online business success stories and analyse the different ways those businesses have exploited novel marketing techniques and succeeded online. Take Apple and the secretive way the company goes about marketing, generating so much gossip blog noise and having the arch creative evangelist in Steve Jobs spreading the sermon of the Apple brand twice a year. Then there’s Google's different approach to online marketing to keep it's search engine dominant, giving away all it's other services for free, all linked through an email address, all easy to use, making us use the brand online and offline, now trumping Microsoft. This leads me to say that all content should be given away free and earn its revenue back through ancillary means. The big question is how?

The music, film and ad industry (and clients) are beginning to take note of some of these online marketing techniques like WOM (this is a great post from Forbes on critical 1% influencers) and make them more prominent or central to their future media and marketing plans. In reality most of us sit in front of a computer screen three or four times longer per day than any TV screen. More of us, especially the youth, are even watching television while we are on our laptops and actually on our laptops. Maybe it’s because music (and video) is so easy and cheap to produce now it has an inherently cheaper value. We’re witnessing, through technology, the democratization of music and now video. Anyone can produce music or film and distribute it on their own dot com for next to nothing causing an explosive fragmentation (the long tail) of the mass media models of the 20th century. There’s no scarcity of channels anymore only an abundance of choice so it's important to develop new (or very old) techniques online and it's trust, relationship and influence that make up the essential elements of successful word of mouth and ultimately whatever you’re promoting it has to be worth it, have value, be entertaining and you want to pass on (usually for free - that's the problem).  That’s why Rick Rubin is in control and why I think more creatives or evangelicals will be given control in other media industries but how will they pay for it and will we want to pay for it?

UPDATE Rubin intends to bring back the subscription model and post articulates the near free revenue model to access all Sony's music - theregister and this next PSFK post on Rubin, subscription and his plan to use his new WOM dept to turn Paul Potts into a star stateside.

The converging industries - Marketing, Publishing and Creativity

THE LINKS
Ad agencies are considering becoming producers, all forms of content producers and publishers are diverging into marketing, advertising and creative producers. It's slowly happening that the traditional industries involved in content creation and marketing are meshing and even taking stakes in businesses they're marketing. Anyone have any other examples or any predictions of how it all might pan out in the end?

Here's a short fun web video of tricks with a bicycle.

Seth Godin on TED

Seth Godin from 2003 at TED talking about ideas virus and TV industrial complex and idea diffusion.
TED has updated and reorganised it's great site so once you've watched this web video, which is now tagged too (you can jump to whatever subject he's talking about). Go and explore the many other great TED talks and notice the post-roll BMW 'interrupted ad'.

Conversational Architect

Just received a twitter message from Steve Rubel with a tinyurl about the blogger David Armano from Logic + Emotion lecture at a recent marketing conference that Bob Glaza blogs about it here. He has embedded the slide show - from slideshare link here - that David Armano used, into his blog which clearly describes how consumers are people and people crave experiences, pleasurable, useful, sustainable experiences which involves design, good design, which doesn't necessary need marketing. He pinpoints five building blocks, usefulness, usability, desirability, sustainability and sociability and leading on to explain that marketeers have to become conversation architects. On the logic + emotion link David Armano describes talking to groups of people for and hour and half and watching to the audience's body language. I prefer talking to much smaller groups of people, involving much more interaction, explanation and productivity, being much more of a conversation and relationship instead of being just a loudspeaker.