Steam clean your Microwave

This post is only very loosely related to the rest of the content of this blog but I couldn't help sharing it because I'm so pleased with the results. The online sharing of information about making your life more efficient (Lifehacking) is, of course, very e-pisteme .

I've never been a sufficiently conscientious cleaner of my microwave to avoid those hard to clearn, permanently cooked-on splatters of food. Nor have I ever found a way to clean them efficiently. I can't imagine that kitchen cleaner in the microwave is good for your health. This weekend however, an off the cuff comment drew a solution from my fiancee's elephantyne memory. And here it is:

Place a bowl of water with lime juice (lemon might work) in the microwave.

Run the microwave for several minutes.

Wipe the condensation and offending blobs clear with a cloth to reveal a shiny new microwave.

I can't recommend the solution enough.

HP Digital Integrated Campaign

In what we're pretty sure is a first for the category in the UK, we recently launched a multimedia campaign for hp which is supported by a mobile website. The campaign is in-market in the UK at the moment and will follow soon in the Netherlands.

HP has launched some great new products recently that have features that don't fully come to life on a static image. We briefed Blue Star Mobile to put together a mobile site that shows the products in action and gives somes specifications. You can check out the sites on your phone or in your computer browser. The tx1000 is a laptop with a screen that swivels and becomes touch screen. The iPAQ 514 is hp's first 'phone'. Among other cool features it allows you to listen to your email.

The campaign integrates analogue and digital worlds through SMS response options on the print advertising and billboards. We're also running some mobile banners on Orange World in the UK.

The number of people who see the site is not likely to be vast. The cost of producing and distributing this kind of content, however, has dropped substantially over the last couple of years and it's now a pretty attractive addition to a conventional campaign.

Facebook Application Tracking

There's a great site that I've been playing around with called Appaholic which has responded to the boom in applications related to Facebook. Using mysteriously-sourced but nevertheless anecdotally plausible data, the site charts the adoption of applications on Facebook.

Below is a chart showing the increase in the number of people who have two of the apps that I've added to my Facebook profile.

Why invent new ideas when you can buy them?

There was an interesting post the other day in a blog that I read occasionnally by a London-based company called Brand Tacticians. It was entitled 'Why buy media when you can earn it?' and argued that investment in media will be increasingly redundant because of free distribution on sites like YouTube. It's not a particularly new concept but it is pretty compelling.

Why, a marketer might ask, should I buy expensive 'old school' media when good creative will show itself to millions? In fact, very few marketers actually ask this question. Most are realist and understand that there are limitations to how compelling and user friendly they can expect their brand and sites to be. They don't really expect to be able to create the next YouTube or Facebook (MySpace is so Web 1.8) or even the next Lonely Girl 15.

Hence the title of this post. Why would you risk substantial amounts of budget on an idea that might or might not go viral? That might or might not be relevant to your brand or your business objectives? Why wouldn't you stick to an advertising approach that works consistently and that delivers against your commercial objectives?

I may be coming across as a bit of a reactionary from a digital media point of view bu that's not the case. It takes an enormous amount of luck and talent to have an idea and an execution that generates 'media' by itself. This is not the kind of talent that creative agencies can deliver 100% of the time and not the kind of luck to bet the farm on.

There is still a vast amount of quality media that can be bought. As long as this is the case it makes sense the that the majority of a marketer's efforts should be directed this way. Simultaneously, however, they need to be looking forward and experimenting with new channels and, in some cases, pushing their agencies to work harder on new approaches.

I've been involved a little bit in a project for hp that I think strikes the balance between realism and forward thinking very well. It's due to launch in a couple of weeks and I'm looking forward to sharing it.

Cunning Viral

I've been sent a viral link to a site promoting the launch of the US serial killer program Dexter in the UK. You can personalise a fictional news reel about a serial killer and their next victim with the name of your friend.

Habbo Hotel

We met with a couple of people from Habbo Hotel earlier this week. If you're not familiar with Habbo, it's a less famous, more commercially successful, teen version of Second Life. Fans (roughly 80% of which are between 13 and 16) create a Habbo representation of themselves and navigate around different Shockwave screens. Lego-like Habbos can instant message each other (but can't share email addresses or phone numbers) and play games together.



The genius of the platform is micropayments. Users (apparently willingly) exchange Habbo credits for accessories within the game or in order to participate in games. The credits are small - about 8.5 pence in the UK - but they add up if the user numbers are large enough.

The Habbo business model is founded almost entirely on these micropayments. They are, however, starting to reach audiences that are large enough, in some instances, to justify advertising. We've run some interesting activity with them in Sweden for Puma and in the UK for the NSPCC. I expect there will be more in the future.

The highlight of my first visit to the Hotel was this exchange:

Habbo 1: >.>
Habbo 2: lol
Habbo 1: >.>
Habbo 2: lol

Sony Home - "Everything Second Life should be..."

Two reps from Sony Home Entertainment came into the agency yesterday to present Sony Home - the virtual meeting place for PlayStation3 which is currently in beta.

I managed to miss the meeting but have caught up with a couple of guys who attended and who were very impressed. The video below is highly recommended to give you a feel for what it will offer.



The demo, apparently, lived up to expectations set by this video. The presenters, for instance, took a picture with his mobile phone and bluetoothed it into a picture frame within his virtual home without any of those awkward silences that usual accompany presentations gaps due to technical demands.

Sony Home is unlikely to capture the global imagination like Second Life has, nor is likely to be able to brag about millions of users. Access will necessarily be restricted to PS3 users, whose numbers are still relatively small compared to the internet universe. The graphics and 'gameplay', however, were apparently beautiful and smooth. It will be signficantly more structured and user friendly than Second Life and the useability is likely to benefit substantially as a result.

It looks like a lot of fun, though to my mind the jury's still out on whether the fun will be sustained across multiple visits or whether it is a novelty world. Second Life has two major weaknesses - poor useability and being kind of pointless. The relative structure of Sony Home should answer the first downfall and go part of the way towards answering the second. It should, too, be sufficiently transparent and user-friendly that advertisers will get involved. Cunning advertisers (including, possibly, some of our clients) should be in a position to add value to the experience.

I'd love to hear the views of those who've seen it in action...

Mobile Codes News

A fellow mobile enthusiast has pointed out that the Mobile Codes Consortium has recently annouced some new members. The addition of Nokia and O2 particularly give additional credibility to the group. This could be a big step forward for the technology.

The Mobile Codes Consortium is advocating creating standards for a technology for mobile phone barcodes that would allow for broad adoption. Mobile barcodes are a superior alternative to SMS shortcodes and could be major step in the development of the mobile web and an internet of things .

Merger Mysteries

There is one thing that I'm struggling to understand about the various recent M&A activity in Webland. I can't, unfortunately, claim to know much about the technologies, the long range plans of Microsoft or Google, or valuing companies for that matter. Nor have I devoted much time to following the recent developments. The angle that I'm struggling with, however, is the importance that the acquisitors (Google particularly) and commentators have placed on ad serving technology.

Over the last couple of years I have had dozens of conversations with colleagues in markets around Europe where I have argued the point for moving to Doubleclick and away from their local preference for consistency across the agency network. I've come across ad serving technologies developed in Sweden, Poland, Russia, the Czech Republic and Australia that have dedicated followers arguing their benefits over Doubleclick. This leads me to infer two things. Firstly, Doubleclick has, quite sensibly, not prioritised having people on the ground in the smallest markets. Secondly, ad serving really is not that complicated.

I'm not saying that I could develop an adserving platform but it seems to me that rumbling Google cynicism will open the door for the growth of smaller adserving platforms. It wasn't that long ago, for instance, that I was convinced that makers of analytics tools would extend into adserving. From an advertiser point of view this would make significantly more sense than Doubleclick and publishers are unlikely to complain.

Mobile Codes Revisited Again

A reader/blogger from Quebec pointed out in a comment today that there has been new press about mobile barcodes related to Qode.

Qode is a technology developed by a UK company called Neomedia. It allows mobile phones to scan a customised, unique, barcode and then open a page in the phone's browser. It, along with competitive applications, has a lot of potential to increase the usage of the mobile web (and the 'real world wide web').

I'm not sure what relationship Qode has with ActivePrint and the Mobile Codes Consortium I wrote about in January .

I have managed, with relative ease, to install the Qode reader on my newly retired Nokia N80 (which wasn't supported by Active Print). It was a quick install and is a nice little piece of software. The example barcodes on the site were both quick and easy to use. Unlike the Active Print site, however, Qode does not offer the ability to make your own barcodes.

Facebook - the hype is justified

I have finally, somewhat behind the curve, started to use Facebook. Initially I intended to spend some time figuring out what the hype was about and whether it could be ruled out as a tool for advertising. It's proven to be a lot more fun than I expected and potentially, even, useful for advertising.

Almost a month into my tenure and it still seems that the hype is justified. It has sustained its addictiveness by being user friendly and useful. It has put me back in touch with people and allows for a very low maintenance method of communicating. Unlike My Space, my last attempt at 'social networking', it is pretty spam free and very searchable.

From an advertising point of view, there are a couple of angles. Banners on social networking sites have been much maligned and typically seem to be for online products of a dubious nature. There are, however, bound to be circumstances where Facebook's (substantial) inventory could be subdivided into useful segments. Advertising for University of Toronto events is often targeted to me. This happens to not be useful as I'm nowhere near the UofT campus, but I expect it is reaching a large proportion of those that are.

There are also occassional 'integrated messages'. Within my news feed (which summarises the various activities of my 'friends') there was an update today which read: "Harry and Voldemort have set their relationship status to "Mortal Enemies."" It's a playful, intelligently integrated reminder that the next wave of Harry Potter mania is on the way.

I've done a quick, unscientific, measure of Facebook users and graphed it (below). The graph represents the breakdown, by graduating year, of Facebookers from secondary schools in three different countries. I got the data by searching the database for numbers, by year, from my highschool and the schools of two of my colleagues (and friends). The sample is very small but is anecdotally illustrative nonetheless. Here are some generalisations:

Facebook is still primarily made up of people who are in education or have recently left it. Three quarters of the sample are in secondary education or have been in the last 4 years.

The spread into the generation older than those currently in education is more advanced in North America than in Europe.

The graph supports a theory that Facebook adoption, as it is driven by 'member get member', tends to occur in clumps. The popularity of the site varies significantly between different graduating years for the Italian and English schools, likely driven by individual social groups. For the Canadian school, where Facebook has more developed penetration, there's a more gradual trailing off. Individual social groups have little impact.

TV is Dead, Long Live TV

I managed, this week, to get an invite to be a beta tester of Joost , the ipTV platform which has been getting a lot of coverage recently. The technology has arguably the perfect pedigree - the backing of the founders of KaZaa and Skype. They are currently in a restricted beta phase, with the intention of launching an open beta in the near future followed by a full launch later in the year.



Joost involves a quick download and installation. It will, eventually, offer consumers the opportunity to watch video on-demand, for free, over their computers. From a content owner point of view, it will offer low cost, secure, distribution over the internet. The platform will be ad-funded, with revenues shared between Joost and content providers. In theory it will offer advertisers a large global audience of viewers segmented by country and whatever demographic categories Joost manages to maintain.

Streaming video's future is a complicated collection of competing offerings and it's difficult to really assess what is likely to be successful. TV Channels have made some effort to respond to the growth of P2P filesharing and YouTube with limited success. NBC while it restricts its content to the US, offers a pretty comprehensive ad-funded video viewer on its site. In the UK, broadband companies and a couple of the TV channels have made attempts to broadcast over the internet. In all cases, the platforms cost money and are restrictive. YouTube, for all its growth has yet to prove that it can sustain its popularity.

iTunes made rapid and successful headway into the music market and offers a compelling alternative to 'piracy' and to music stores by being convenient, relatively comprehensive, competitively priced and offering more than P2P sites (e.g. album cover images).

Will Joost be the iTunes of video? It certainly looks like the most likely contender at the moment. Its P2P model should make it relatively economical to maintain (as opposed to YouTube which must cost an absolute fortune to keep in bandwidth). Assuming there are some improvements in the interface and the image quality it should offer a more enjoyable experience than television (even Sky+ and TiVO). Advertisers should, eventually, see an attractive concentration of audiences.

It also has the potential to deliver on the failed promises of interactive television. Rather than suffering through the extended load times following the push of a red button, users will only have to move their mouse in order to make ads 'interactive'. This feature will allow for easy response mechanisms and follow ups, or delivery of further content.



Having played with the software, read some of the coverage and met with their sales team I'd say that Joost looks likely to have a significant impact on video over the internet. They have a number of hurdles ahead of them but all look surmountable. The technology is adequate and will almost certainly see significant improvements. There isn't yet that much to watch but more content providers are likely to follow, especially as Viacom is now signed on. They'll need to grow their audience, but are likely to do this with relative ease once the technology will sustain it. Finally, they'll need to sign on advertisers. Assuming they reach a critical mass of viewers globally and in key markets, this should be manageable. They have (noble and justified) ambitions to have advertising content adapted specifically for the platform which may complicate their selling job, atleast in the near future.

Joost is definitely one to watch.

Ad-funded Software

I've had two meetings recently with companies that are experimenting with ad-funded software from either end of the spectrum.

The first was with Spiceworks , a company that has developed an IT management package for SMBs that is ad funded. It seems like a great idea. By the sounds of it they have a good piece of software with a loyal and growing user base who have significant influence on IT purchasing. (If anyone has used the product I'd love to hear their views on it). The software is browser-based and the advertising can be served through third-party ad servers. They don't yet have a great deal of European usership but I'm keen to try them out at some point.

At the other end of the spectrum is Microsoft. They're now selling advertising on their Office Help pages . Office is not going to be entirely ad-funded in the near future but it is an interesting development. Steve Ballmer was extremely pro-advertising when he was in London in October.

MS Office help is not, currently, as compelling a place to advertise as Spiceworks. There are better environments to advertise in and the audience is not as refined and specific as Spiceworks. It does make me wonder how long it will be before other non-media brands monetise their web traffic through advertising. E-commerce is the new in-store.

Blue Star Mobile

I met with the guys from Blue Star Mobile last week to catch up about recent developments.

We worked together on a campaign for British Airways but haven't done anything together recently.

They've done a lot of growing over the last year or so, opening small offices in the US and in China.

I got them talking a bit about The Sun and their plans to increase the mobile content associated with their paper edition. There are plans, apparently, to use WAP pages and mobile video streaming to provide content via short code response and QR codes in the paper. I'm not too clear on what the timelines are and what the take up is likely to be but it sounds interesting.

Visual Sciences

I've recently become exposed to Visual Sciences , a tool that looks like it deserves its growing reputation as a next-generation web analytics tool.

I have a client who is going to do a test implementation on their site over the next couple of months. It sounds as though they will likely be the first major UK client for Visual Sciences, which was acquired by Web Side Story about this time last year.

They seem to be mostly 'under the radar'. The site is not particularly enlightening, and web searches for the product name don't through up a great deal of commentary that isn't ophthalmology-related.

Clickz.com has a good list of predictions for analytics in 2007 which suggests that Web Side Story enterprise customers will be gradually migrated onto the Visual Sciences. It certainly seems to be the case with my client, who sent an RFP to Web Side Story, and was pitched Visual Sciences in response.

It sounds like it's a pretty great tool. Apparently it does the sort of thing that you'd expect would be common place (but aren't) - segmenting data 'on-the-fly', giving evocative visualisations of the strengths and weaknesses of websites and merging different data sources.

I have a friend who has had a couple of meetings with the Visual Science team. He was very enthusiastic about the tool and its strengths. There do seem to be plenty of 'hooks' - rumours that the technology is based on algorithms developed by the CIA, an interface designed by 3-D game designers and anecdotes about vast amounts of incremental revenue earned by existing clients through optimisation and A/B testing.

It will be very interesting to watch and participate in the implementation. Hopefully the reported price tag of about $300k will mean that the client is ambitious with their allocation of human resources as well. Even a user-friendly analytics package needs trained and experienced operators, not to mention people to co-ordinate web designers, developers and agencies.

Advertising Time Capsule

Those living in London will be aware of a refurbishment underway to the platform and tunnels of the underground. This is in preparation for new advertising installations by Viacom, who were recently awarded the contract to sell the advertising space for Transport for London.

Currently, in one of the hallways to the Southbound Victoria line at Oxford Circus, there is an advertising time capsule. For some reason, someone has gone to the trouble of removing layers of advertising and has revealed posters, mostly intact, from 20 years ago. It's a really neat effect. There are ads for exhibitions at museums, for films and for clothing stores, all from about 1990 I think.

I wish now that I'd stopped to look more closely and take a couple of photos with my diabolically bad cameraphone. Hopefully the posters will be there next time I go through.

Brand New Tag Cloud

I've just added a tag cloud to the blog with the help of the very useful explanations and code here . It's very e-pisteme.

E-pisteme - How the World's Information is Organised.

In October I wrote a post taking credit for the invention of the word e-pisteme. I was being both facetious and ambitious. Epistemology is not a subject I know a great deal about and to be honest I'm not at all confident of my knowledge of the subject matter. Nevertheless, I think that e-pisteme is probably a useful word that bears some explanation.

In a brilliant but dense book of 1966 called Les mots et les choses (translated to The Order of Things Michel Foucault set out a disciplined and thorough argument illustrating the relationship between culture, history and perception. His thesis was, roughly, that human experience is structured according to the prevalent culture within which an individual lives. He organised history between the Renaissance and the late 19th Century into different epistemes. Each episteme consists of a set of ideas and beliefs that structure the language, art, science, politics and commerce of the age.

In his preface, he makes reference to a short story by Jorge Luis Borges that quotes a fictional chinese encyclopedia that divides animals into "
(a) those that belong to the Emperor,
(b) embalmed ones,
(c) those that are trained,
(d) suckling pigs,
(e) mermaids,
(f) fabulous ones,
(g) stray dogs,
(h) those that are included in this classification,
(i) those that tremble as if they were mad,
(j) innumerable ones,
(k) those drawn with a very fine camel's hair brush,
(l) others,
(m) those that have just broken a flower vase,
(n) those that resemble flies from a distance."

Foucault's point was that this is an altogether non-sensical approach to organisation to a modern western reader but, within Borges' fiction atleast, it represented a sensible system.

Effectively, the episteme within which we lives defines the way that we structure our knowledge, experience the world and interact with others.

When you consider that Google's mission statement is to "organise the world's information" you realise that there might well be plenty of opportunity to apply an epistemelogical approach to the changes brought about by the internet.

My ambition with this word is to try to find tangible examples of an epistemelogical shift driven by the internet. This means going beyond the banal observations about 'the democratization of the media' or that 'You' are the person of the year.

It's quite possible that someone more knowledgeable and dedicated has taken this idea further or that there are bigs flaws in these ideas. Either way, feedback would be appreciated.

State of Online Advertising Research

I went to a couple of sessions of a IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) Europe on Friday afternoon. They were presentations of research prepared by various members and associations within the IAB.

For the most part the presentations were continuing to emphasise the uptake and consumer enthusiasm for the internet. It's the kind of research that, in the UK at least, was useful about two years ago, before broadband was ubiquitous. Now, stating that x% of people in the UK are online is a bit like saying that y% of people in the UK live in London. It's a big number but is not surprising to anybody and has little practical application.

The next step forward for online research, with the exception of isolated client-specific projects, will be when there is the critical mass to really unravel what it is that people do online and how this relates to their 'real' lives. Heather Hopkins , at Hitwise, publishes interesting perspectives on a pretty regular basis.

Online advertising has got to the point where it's no longer enough to say how many people are online. We now need to make a pretty sizeable leap to the types of insights that are delivered 'offline' around segmentation of populations, understanding of purchase 'triggers' and analysis of offline and online interaction.

We're working on a couple of isolated but forward-thinking projects in the agency. For the most part, however, within the industry there still isn't the budget and expertise to deliver strategic media/marketing thinking that effectively includes online.

UGC heading for the Trough of Disillusionment?

A colleague pointed out this recent article on Net Imperative about the lack of commercial opportunities for User Generated Content sites (specifically UGC video sites).

I don't think it's surprising to anyone in the industry that it's hard to get revenue from UGC video. There was certainly speculation around the wisdom of the YouTube price tag. Nevertheless, video sharing sites have taken off so much in terms of consumption that it's been relatively easy to ignore the fact that they're almost certainly still money-losing propositions.

My colleague point to the article as an indicator that UGC is entering what the Gartner Hype Cycle refers to as the 'trough of disillusionment'.

BMW-branded content

I've come across a really interesting marketing program by BMW in the US. It's a website/blog/ongoing podcasts and a series of events of really high quality content. I don't think I've come across another non-media brand that has succeeded in using internet to become a successful content provider yet. Who knows if this program is successful. If the content is anything to go by though, it should be.

Below is a videocast by Malcolm Gladwell. I'd recommend checking out the site. I visited it after watching a talk given by a sociologist called Barry Schwartz on a blog called Business Evolutionist ,

Cola bores.

I just read an interesting post on a blog called This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics . It's an interesting blog by a guy called Grant McCracken, who writes about how business defines culture.

He's written a post in reference to a Wall Street Journal article about Pepsi. [The article isn't online yet - the WSJ seems to have a very odd approach to commercialising its content online. The Economic Times (of India) has published a related article.]

Pepsi has announced a program where they will change the look of their cans over 30 times in the next year in order to stay hip with the youngsters. I have to admit that I misread McCraken's post initially and thought that Pepsi planned to change their logo every two weeks. That would have been interesting.

As it is, I'm not sure this announcement is particularly significant. Coke has certainly made a tradition out of seasonal packaging and both the cola companies have had tactical cans on a pretty consistent basis. I would have thought, too, that it will make for some pretty cluttered looking fridges in stores as different sets of cans are mixed together. I wonder how retailers feel about the idea of having to buy stock that looks almost immediately out of date.

It would be way cooler if they decided to change the logo every two weeks.

I want an iPhone

There are already a whole host of people posting smug announcements that they predicted the iPhone years ago. I didn't think that Apple would brave such a crowded market.

I remember hearing somewhere that Nokia was talking freely about how, in the grand scheme of personal electronic devices, the iPod was a drop in the bucket. The 40m unit sales of iPods pales in comparison to the number of mobile phones that have sold. I don't expect Nokia are particularly worried about the iPhone either.

It will be interesting to read the early reviews and find out whether they've managed to deliver on everything that the website is promising. You certainly don't want a phone that has the glitches that some of the iPods out there have had. I'm also keen to know how much it will cost and whether it will be available in the UK. Unless the reviews are really negative or it costs as much as a laptop I'll be lining up to get one.

Pepsi and Mentos

It's funny, it never occurred to me that Pepsi and Mentos would have the same effect as Coke and Mentos.






It certainly didn't have the same impact on search volumes (Coke, in blue, peaks in June and Pepsi doesn't).

Flickr - Beyond the Banner

I really like the (relatively) new feature on Flickr aggregates data about the camera used to take the photos taken.

It's called Camera Finder and it tracks the number of users using the top camera models and see different types of camera used by each camera. If I was in the market for a camera I'd find this really useful.

The Nikon sponsorship of the page is a nice buy. Their landing page for the D80 is pretty nice too.

Yahoo! Local Search on the Road

Silicon.com has re-published a piece of news from their American cousins Cnet news about a Sat Nav company that will be offering Yahoo! Local Search listings as part of their service.

It's my impression that Sat Nav services have, for a long time, been able to tell you where the nearest gas station or fast food restaurant is. This sounds as though it will take things a good deal further, allowing users to search for all kinds of services.

It's a good example of the mobile web being overlayed on top of the real world.

Mobile Codes Revisited

I've been doing some digging and I see that the Mobile Codes Consortium mission statement is probably not the biggest announcement for European QR codes this week. Scott Shaffer has written a post on The Pondering Primate about relationship between Google and China Mobile.

Google will be providing search functionality to China Mobile users, many of whom will have QR code readers produced by a China Mobile subsidiary, pre-installed on their phones. Shaffer surmises that it won't be long before Google offers its users a QR coding service and I have to agree.

Google, beyond being the almighty technology brand, has a significant customer-base that already uses a web-based interface for pay-per-performance information organisation services. They could easily commercialise a pay-per-code or pay-per-scan service. The precise terms of the system might be a bit complicated (you couldn't limit the number of scans of a QR code the way that you can with SEM campaigns, for instance.

It will be interesting to see how this develops.

Mobile Codes Consortium Mission Statement Announced

I posted a couple of months ago about the work that was being done by Tim Kindberg at HP Labs in Bristol to promote a standardised approach to mobile barcodes.

One of the topics of conversation was a 'Mobile Codes Consortium' - a project to gain understanding and consensus across the different industries that are needed to make the technology work.

A reader has kindly pointed out that a mission statement for the consortium has been posted on the Active Print website.

If the consortium succeeds in creating enthusiasm within handset manufacturers and/or mobile networks I don't think there's any question that this technology could take off.

The media planners in the room in November were certainly excited about the technology. In the near future it could be very useful for a specific type of campaign that supports a strong brand and targets early adopters. In the medium to long term, direct response campaign planners will likely get excited about the opportunities as well.

I do think, however, that the technology has greater applications outside the conventional definition of advertising. There is a great deal of potential applications related to local search and mapping as well as dynamic packaging and in-store display.

There is still the considerable question of mass adoption of the technology on handsets. I have no doubt that this would be greeted with enthusiasm by media planners and that in some isolated ways we'll also be able to bring it about a little bit quicker.

Any thoughts?