Modern Marketing - Blog by Collaborate PR & Marketing

Fanning, Cohen And Now Kan

One of the remarkable, recurring themes of our times is how an individual can take an idea onto the web and, often through the power of naïve enthusiasm, accidentally force a billion-dollar media industry to rethink everything it does - whoops!.  This, of course, is what happened when Shawn Fanning unleashed his college dorm project – Napster - onto the world.  Devastating the music business wasn’t Fanning's goal.  He just wanted to help his friends find their favourite tracks more easily.  But the Big Labels never recovered and even though Napster wasn’t the only P2P service offering music downloads, Fanning became the unfortunate public enemy number one of the powerful RIAA and its crazed legal battles.  Then came Bram Cohen, the creator of BitTorrent, a P2P protocol that allowed people to share large software files online more easily, by breaking them up across networks of participants’ computers then making them easy to find and reassemble.  Rather than relying on one machine to sit at the centre of a network and do all of the hard work.  Such was the success of Cohen’s brainchild that at one point BitTorrent was thought to account for one third of all internet traffic.  The result was the disembowelment of the movie industry’s distribution model and the eternal wrath of the MPAA.  However, like Fanning, profits didn’t seem to be Cohen’s motivating factor.  The only visible source of income from the BitTorrent project has been the T-shirts he has sold to its fans, emblazoned with the slogan, ‘Give And Ye Shall Receive’.  And now we have Justin Kan, creator of Justin.tv.  Kan’s original experiment in 2007 involved wiring himself up to a mobile camcorder that streamed live onto the web.  His motivation was to let people create their own ‘livestreams’, with the undercurrent ideal that CCTV shouldn’t be available only to the authorities.  However, Justin.tv has quickly developed into a service that allows anyone to create a live TV channel.  Today the site attracts more than 41 million visitors per month and has 428,000 'channels'.  Some of which are dull feeds of people sitting at their desk working, others are vibrant niche channels of hobbyists.  However, a few are feeds of live sports events that individuals are uploading from their paid subscription services, complete with community tools such as chat.  Sound familiar?  The difference may be that Shawn Fanning and Bram Cohen were the pioneers who taught the legal profession that the world has actually changed.  And Kan’s service is already joining a burgeoning, web TV ecosystem.  For instance, Fanning financed his project with the help of his uncle while Cohen had no commercial aspirations at all.  However, Kan’s project is supported by Silicon Valley’s respected technologist Paul Graham and his fund Y-Combinator.  The fly-in-the-p2p-ointment is that live events, particularly sports, are meant to be one of the last bastions of broadcast TV’s superiority.  So it seems unlikely the industry will just sit on the sidelines.  However, the trend of passionate individuals unknowingly wreaking havoc on global industries continues.  And Justin Kan looks like he might just be the next innovator to keep media executives' heads spinning.

Marketing Is No Longer A Game

The $500bn global marketing industry is driven by metrics.  TVRs, GRs, OTS, TGI, ABC, BARB, CPC, CPA, PI, CPM, frequency, benchmarking, response, reach, hits – the range of measurement systems has exploded as the complexity of marketing continues to increase.  Which has led to a gaming mentality among some parts of the industry, where almost any activity can be shown to be successful.  If it looks like a campaign isn’t working it doesn’t mean it’s ineffective.  It means you're standing in the wrong spot.  However, in the share-and-compare world of personal media, social networks and communities, it’s simply not possible to game the system.  If you’ve created a Facebook page, or an online forum, or an all singing-and-dancing app fest with mobile bells and whistles simply begging to be API’d and distributed around the widget world, no level of metric analysis will demonstrate success if no one joins in the fun.  Any figures you try and flaunt to justify the activity will be drowned out by the sound of silence as the wind whistles through your Twitter feed, swinging the doors on the hinges of your silent social experience.  No level of metrics will disguise the fact that No One Is In There.  And should you try and lay a little Astroturf or sock up a few puppets, you are likely to discover that your conversational marketing takes on all the allure of a bowl of plastic fruit.  Now whether this is of any significance depends upon your viewpoint of where the marketing world is headed.  I chaired a little social gathering down at the IPA a couple of weeks ago where Mark Earls put the case for a connected, networked world being a sea change for every part of the communications industry.  While others declared social to be a welcome new ingredient to the already murky marketing soup – but no more than that.  Just DM and WOM for a new era.  So if you’re with the Herdmeister then the fact that the game is up...

Learn To Earn

Freddie Laker (no not that one) gets to the nub of the matter: "Sometimes I like to talk about the "paradox of marketing.” As marketers we feel obligated to get our clients/brands where the eyeballs are. We then descend on that thing like vultures and in most cases we destroy that thing we originally loved and saw as an opportunity to reach consumers. (Think George from “Of Mice and Men” with the rabbit.) We’re currently in the process of killing Twitter as well.  The next great mobile revolution will be focused on the culmination of social networks, geo-location services, content creation/sharing, augmented reality and the functions that come with rapidly increased bandwidth, such as live streaming video. My fear is that marketers will be irresponsible and will use these technologies to pound consumers with horrible interruptive ads that make consumers revolt against mobile marketing. We’ve already had epic failures with some marketers’ mass SMS broadcasting and then the totally idiotic idea of connecting to discoverable Bluetooth phones when they’re in proximity of a broadcast point.  There’s so much new technology that has the potential to redefine interaction between brands and consumers, but unfortunately too many of us are still using advertising techniques that we’ve used for the last century — and they are primarily disruptive in nature.  The “techies” have done a great job of continuing to innovate and evolve the medium. Now it’s time for marketers to show the same passion for innovation and evolve with the medium, rethink our approaches and be respectful of the most intimate of digital touch points. We’re marching into holy ground with mobile marketing and if we’re not careful a select few of us will ruin it for the rest of us and this time, I don’t think consumers will be as forgiving."  (Via Heavyset).

Web TV - Game On

This weekend England play a World Cup qualifying game in the Ukraine.  One notable aspect of the match will be that people in the UK will only be able to watch it via the web, on a pay-per-play basis.  It’s yet another example of the trends that are morphing TV as we know it into a new modern web-based format.  The most significant force behind this change is economic.  The match was originally planned to be shown on satellite TV by Setanta.  However, after the Irish company was credit crunched by super-high gearing and a collapse in the advertising market, the rights were picked up by Kentaro which will stream the game to one million football fans this weekend for a modest one-off fee.  It’s snack TV as opposed to the mega-banquet offered by Sky.  Just like Apple’s iTunes is for people who wish to consume their music tapas-style.  The most notable point about this new commercial offering is that it’s not new.  Football fans who can’t afford premium TV packages or Premier League tickets have long been following their beloved teams via illegal web streams.  Often putting up with terrible quality, inconsistent transmissions, tiny pop-up screens and Chinese commentary.  I'm sure many of these fans will be happy to pay a little this weekend.  As Arseblog, the popular Arsenal FC blogger puts it: 'If I could pay a couple of quid and watch the game via a stream that wasn't up and down and freezing and jumping and refreshing I'd happily do it. The same goes for league games.'  Expect plenty more such innovation in TV.  Just don’t expect the TV industry to be involved.  Incredibly, the traditional business is mirroring the plight of its musical cousin by ignoring clear signals from customers about what they want.  Just like the Big Record Labels, the Big TV Networks are falling on the wrong side of the Innovator’s Dilemma.  The plight whereby companies desperately attempt to prop up their existing revenues and fail to engage with exciting new technologies that people love.  Despite the fact that if they did embrace new kit and behaviour their tired old businesses would get a shot in the arm, instilling some faith among jaded shareholders.  But they aren't.  So a gap appears in the market and and new innovators pile in, building products in line with public demand.  And the new Web TV ecosystem begins to take shape.  All built on the fast-growing popularity of watching TV on a laptop or PC.  A distinction that will soon be redundant as devices merge.  But don't make the mistake of thinking that it will then be back to business as usual.  That's just where the fun begins as TV content becomes another web application upon which other tools can be built.  And then it's game on.

Will It Be Facebook Wot Won It?

The Sun’s decision to support the UK Conservative party instead of Gordon Brown’s New Labour is creating plenty of interesting discussion.  Spinmeister Alastair Campbell says The Sun isn’t as important as it once was.  Well, he would say that wouldn’t he?  However, whatever his motivation, he’s right.  Now, there’s nothing I like more than putting my feet up with a bacon sandwich, cup of char and The Currant Bun, but it surely isn’t the massive social and cultural force it was in the eighties.  In 1992, the paper had huge sway and cruelly lampooned Neil Kinnock with this classic front page.  Then followed it up with the famous headline – ‘It Was The Sun Wot Won It!’.  Powered by the vast yet always entertaining ego of Kelvin McKenzie, The Nation’s Favourite reached its highest average sale in the week ending 16 July, 1994, when the daily figure was 4,305,957.  Today, along with all other nationals, The Sun's circulation is greatly diminished.  Although at more than 3 million is still very substantial.  However, in the nineties we weren't all connected up to each other.  There weren't 10-20m Brits active on Facebook (depending on who you believe).  The share-and-compare economy was still restricted to chats over the garden fence.  I’ve long given up on the idea that one media will usurp another.  But I really believe the soup is getting thicker and more interesting.  In 1990, newspapers were opinion and opinion were newspapers.  Today, the mainstream media shrieks out its sensational opinion often highlighting the darkest most gruesome aspects of our generally splendid country.  However, that is then filleted, dissected and reduced down to a more reflective – frequently more positive view – by individuals who comment, link, curate, challenge and question the views of Murdoch & Co.  Far from being the echo chamber that mainstream media often characterizes social and other networked media as, the web is now the way the majority of people filter what’s good and bad.  They listen to their friends and see what they are paying attention to.  So will it be The Sun wot win it for Cameron?  Or will it be up to Facebook to give him the thumbs-up?

The Moment I Knew Facebook Was Here For Good

The moment I knew Facebook was here for good and was also going to be massively influential was during a conversation last year with my friend Mark.  Now Mark is a very successful builder from Bolton who couldn't care less about the blogosphere, the plannersphere or any other web-o-sphere and despite my efforts to explain over many lively pints of ale, he has no idea what I do for a living.  So when Mark briefly mentioned that he was on Facebook because, 'all my mates are,'  I knew Zuckerberg's vision was no longer a dream - whatever you think of the man or his inexplicable love of shower shoes.  However, possibly because of the very reason that Mark has signed up - ie ubiquity - Facebook is viewed with suspicion by geeks and the digerati in a way that Google is not.  But FB is just powering on regardless.  In this article, Wired magazine's Fred Vogelstein reported on the ambitions that Zuckerberg holds and the genuine challenge it represents for Messrs Brin and Page.  Which can be summarised as, 'searching people, not pages'.  Do you sometimes scratch your head at Google results and wish you could just ask your friends what they think?  That's what Facebook is looking to do.  And now it's making real cash and plenty of it, exploding the notion that there's no money in the social web.  Largely thanks to its souped-up...

The Need For Speed

I’ve recently found myself perusing the day-to-day differences between the marketing industry when I started my career in 1992 and today.  And I think it boils down to one word – speed.  As a college newbie I remember coming to terms with the fact that much of my account executive job was managing paperwork between the agency team and the client.  From months before the campaign, through the launch, during the programme and at the end of the activity.  Proposals, updates, status reports and analysis documents were constantly ping-ponged backwards and forwards.  Sometime quickly, sometimes very slowly.  But back then quickly meant on a weekly basis.  These papertrails underwrote the activity of the marketing industry.  Activity that was gathered, prepared, nurtured, planned – often in excruciating detail – before being launched into the market.   However, today’s markets are faster.  Which means marketing needs to be faster.  Including the systems and processes that keep the wheels turning.  So what’s driving this need for speed?  A while back Johnnie pointed out to me that customers now have the technological advantage over companies. Anyone who boots up their corporate laptop and then goes to make a cup of tea while the processor sorts through a million security patches and firewall protocols, will understand this.  Compared to the ease with which individuals can draw upon free web power or download new applications, corporations are technically hamstrung.  Which can lead to a disconnection with customers.  ‘We no longer feel we are immersed in our customers’ world,’ a manager from a mega FMCG company told me, frustrated by his IT department's refusal to let his PC access social networking sites.  But turbo-charging the speed at which the marketing industry works isn’t a trivial fix.  Go-faster stripes aren’t enough.  Corporations and brands still...

Conversational Marketing (And Why It's Good To Hate)

In recent discussions I have described the stuff that happens where the world of networked media and marketing collide as, ‘conversational marketing’. Now, I am aware that this is hardly a breakthrough term. The c-word is now firmly lodged into the boilerplate of every marketing proposal to hit the pitch desk in 2009.  And it drives some people to distraction as it suggests some type of creepy word-of-mouth practice where ‘friends’ start dropping brand names into conversations in the pub.  Particularly those that they have spontaneously found to deliver amazing value or excellent customer service.  However, I think it does work when the companies in question realise that there are some conversations in which they can take part with credibility - and others that they shouldn’t touch with a conversational bargepole.  Identifying which those conversations are isn’t entirely straightforward.  That’s because brands instinctively want to go and hang out with the cool kids.  An example would be a massive brand trying to follow someone on Twitter.  Or a product trying to join a blog chat. Both of which can result in cringe-making disaster.  However, there are, unsurprisingly, conversations that brands can have and join with credibility.  The trick, in my experience, is to start with working out what the company or brand in question is passionate about.  Now this question may result in much eye-rolling from cycnical execs who equate the health of the corporate balance sheet with pain not passion.  Or alternatively, lip service to some corporate mission statement or, worse still brand bible, which has all the passion of a Stepford Wife.  However, I have found that by digging beneath the corporate facade you can almost always find something of genuine interest, even if it at first sight it seems weird or dumb.  One way into the subject is to find out what people in the company or organisation hate.  Answers I've had to that line of enquiry have included the way their company is portrayed in the press.  Or an irritation about a damaging urban myth that won't go away.  Something similar, I believe, is what set Robert Scoble off on his bleeding-edge blogging mission at Microsoft.  Staff at the software giant who felt they were doing good work in the areas of healthcare or innovative engineering were fed up with being seen as the Evil Empire.  By talking about the good stuff on Channel 9, they were able to engage in a genuine conversation that went beyond the brand.  The other good thing about the term conversational marketing, that I have taken to pointing out, is that people instinctively know a good conversation from a bad one.  There’s no need to analyse or measure it.  Everyone already knows.

More On Free

Brad Burnham from Union Square Ventures offers a nicely nuanced view on the Free debate:  "Both sides of the debate about Free do not seem to acknowledge how fundamentally different the relationship between suppliers and consumers is on the web. Services are not offered for free at all. There is an exchange of value between users, the creators of the raw material - data, content, and meta-data, and the network where that data is converted into insight. This exchange is still governed by the basic laws of economics but the currency is not dollars, it's attention. The network that takes attention and converts it into insight is also quite different than a traditional firm. The services they provide are more like those we expect from a government than a company. Craigslist, Facebook, and Twitter all provide (or try to provide) a robust stable reliable infrastructure (hosting, bandwidth), security, safety, and dispute resolution. In all three cases, the product users create and consume emerges organically from this environment."

Pirate Bay Seeks NASDAQ Gold?

By any standards, the purchase of Pirate Bay, the world's largest Bittorrent tracker, by the Global Gaming Factory is an ambitious, some would say crazy, business venture. Unravelling the legal spaghetti around the site's activities looks like an impossible task.  It's hard to imagine the RIAA et al, suddenly changing their world view of the site that has been Hollywood's public enemy number one for so many years.  Particularly after continuing court action, despite the PB founders high-profile conviction earlier this year.  So today's suggestion by GGF boss, Hans Pandeya, that he expects to be able to turn the site into a business that could one day list on NASDAQ, the premier US technology stockmarket, seems incredible.  In fact, it's likely to be more pirate mischief.  Padeya's comment that, 'The Pirate Bay is a strong brand in the US and most parties who have showed interest in the project are based there,' must surely be tongue-in-cheek.  However, there is no doubt that The Pirate Bay is a powerful modern day brand around which people are keen to convene.  How many other websites have gone on to win seats in the European Parliament?  And of course, the PB service has a vast network of individuals powering the delivery of chunky media content on demand.  GGF appear to have a plan to put these assets to a genuine commercial use, which would be the most remarkable of turnaround stories.  Or maybe Mr Pandeya just believes his company is on the right side of the argument and that markets trends will eventually make the acquisition look like deal-of-the-century.  He may have a point.  Certainly, when you read about the latest RIAA victim, it's hard not to wonder who the crazy people really are.

Through The Chaos...

When AdAge’s maverick journalist Bob Garfield rang me in 2005 to say he had been reading the manifesto I had written that February and wanted me to help him out with an article, I was both flattered and impressed.  (He could easily have pinched everything without attribution).  Garfield had created quite a storm that year on Madison Avenue with his polemic entitled: 'Chaos Scenario - A Look at the Marketing Industry's Coming Disaster'.  It was a vision of media meltdown that at the time seemed more like doom-mongering than prescience, as the world’s credit markets continued to pump out a never-ending supply of cash.  However, looking back in the context of today’s bleaker times, it isn't nearly as outrageous.  Google’s annual revenues have gone from $3bn to $20bn since Garfield’s warning note.  Meaning the company’s grip over the newspaper industry has become a stranglehold.  When a group of German publishers tried to challenge the Googleplex last week, the response from Mountain View was to the point: 'If you don't want to show up in Google search results, it doesn't require more than one or two lines of code,' blogged a Google executive in response.  Going on to add the chilling reminder for those tempted to actually add the innocuous script that: 'Google delivers more than a billion consumer visits to newspaper web sites each month.'   This unenviable pinch between Google’s rock and the hard place of Craig’s List has of course left many famous US newspapers reeling.  And now the pain is being felt in the UK too.  Most notably in TV where analysts are no longer mincing their words: 'This is horrible, a worrying sign that we didn’t want that perhaps the issue is structural and not just cyclical due to the recession.'  Garfield’s doomsday scenario did in fact end on a high: 'What emerges from the ruins will be superior in every way to what it replaced. Better for marketers, better for the economy'.  And the follow-up essay (the one I helped out with): 'Inside the New World of Listenomics - How the Open Source Revolution Impacts Your Brands,' was an upbeat assessment of what lay beyond the chaos, including many forecasts that have come to fruition.  Fast forward to today and Garfield’s ongoing assessment of the emerging media world can be found on his new blog, 'The Chaos Scenario' - to which he has asked me to contribute.  The aim of the blog is to move the conversation on beyond the doom and gloom that everyone is feeling today - as well as help sell his book!  'The question for business – as well as government, religion, science, politics, academia and every other institution hitherto operated from the top down – is what to do now,' Garfield writes.  Don't you agree...?

Behavioural Advertising Is Here Right?

Remember when Gmail launched in 2004 and there was an outcry because Google would be matching adverts to what people wrote in their emails?  At the time the BBC even found someone called Simon Davies, from something called Privacy International, to describe the proposed system as, "a vast violation of European law".  Then what happened?  We all started using it, realised it was really good and never gave the privacy issue a second thought.  Now nearly 150 million people use Gmail each month to communicate about important business issues and to share details about their personal lives with friends and family.  And occasionally you might notice that as you write an email, associated adverts appear, some of which may be helpful.  Earlier this year, I saw the ever-insightful Peter Bazelgette describe at a NESTA event how he thought that in the future content will be paid for, "with attention and access to personal data."  And that we would all just get over the privacy issues.  So is that it?  The old ‘value exchange’ in media was - we provide you cheap-ish, good quality media as long you agree to also watch or read a few ads along the way.  The new version is - we’ll provide you free, good quality media as long as you share a few details about yourself, aka ‘behavioural advertising’.  In fact, as Gmail shows, it’s already here in Gibsonesque style.  However, for many it’s still a sensitive issue that needs to be carefully handled.  So probably best if you don’t call your company something that sounds like a new flu virus or describe its role in a way that brings to mind an intimate medical routine.  Indeed, now that about one-fifth of all Internet users have Facebook accounts, and practically live within Zuckerberg’s walls, sharing about 4 billion pieces of information per month between them, I think it’s fair to say that the whole privacy argument has moved on.  People aren't exactly shy on the web these days.  The final step towards a behavioural world looks to be Google’s plan to link DoubleClick, the massive ad serving network it bought last year, with its search index and then roll out behavioural display advertising.  Which will probably leave everyone up in arms and Disgraced of Tunbridge Wells in a state of total outrage.  Until they forget all about it and accept that it’s actually just fine.  And at that point, the oldest problem in advertising, will have been solved. Right?