Planting Change

Belarussian Magic

2008-07-04T23:03:00.002+01:00

Until not too long ago Belarussia wasn't an independent state and video over the internet was science fiction. A friend recently shared a video that shows how far we've come. Witness the unique culture of Minsk, Belarus as seen 1.8 million times online.

2008-06-15T03:53:00.001+01:00

Steam clean your Microwave

2007-07-15T15:34:00.000+01:00

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

2007-07-13T22:57:00.001+01:00

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

2007-07-12T23:04:00.000+01:00

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?

2007-07-07T13:07:00.001+01:00

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

2007-07-04T22:24:00.000+01:00

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

2007-06-27T22:05:00.000+01:00

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..."

2007-06-10T09:42:00.000+01:00

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

2007-06-06T21:28:00.000+01:00

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

2007-05-30T22:11:00.001+01:00

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

2007-04-02T22:20:00.000+01:00

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

2007-04-01T17:04:00.000+01:00

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

2007-03-25T10:50:00.000+01:00

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

2007-03-08T21:24:00.000Z

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

2007-02-15T21:39:00.000Z

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

2007-02-03T18:40:00.000Z

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

2007-02-02T23:29:00.000Z

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

2007-02-01T22:29:00.000Z

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.

2007-01-28T21:55:00.000Z

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

2007-01-28T21:30:00.000Z

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?

2007-01-20T21:03:00.000Z

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

2007-01-14T17:22:00.000Z

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.

2007-01-14T16:12:00.000Z

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

2007-01-09T22:08:00.000Z

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

2007-01-09T21:54:00.000Z

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

2007-01-07T20:51:00.000Z

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

2007-01-06T20:11:00.000Z

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

2007-01-06T19:46:00.000Z

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

2007-01-06T10:35:00.000Z

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?

The Coke and Mentos Meme

2006-12-29T19:12:00.000Z

I expect that you're familiar with the dramatic outcomes from mixing Coke and Mentos mints. Tens of millions of people have watched thousands of different videos (almost 1,400 on Google Video alone) of people dropping Mentos into Coke bottles on all the major video sharing sites.

If you take a look at the search volumes for Coke Google Trends (below, in blue) there's a noticeable impact of the phenomenon. The global volume of searches is higher for Coke than at any other point in its history. The significance of this is hard to isolate, particularly as Trends doesn't offer a scale. For example, why would anyone search on Coke if they weren't looking for something like this? Coke, too, isn't the kind of brand that needs to benefit from increased awareness. It does, however, benefit from consideration and preference. Do these videos deliver this? If you consider Coke's efforts in digital music downloads and compare the quantity and quality of interaction with the brand I suspect that this meme is an extremely useful one for them.

Coke, however, is just half the equation. When you overlay the volume of searches for Mentos (below in red) on the graph from above you can see a brand benefitting by a whole new order of magnitude. Mentos does not have the awareness of Coke and these videos won't change that. I wonder though, if Mentos marketers are in the habit of taking regular ACP studies - if so I bet this phenomenon would be sufficiently significant to be measured.

I chatted with a guy who works on Mentos in Europe and it sounds as though they're ecstatic about the situation, having had nothing to do with creating it. The impact on sales has been significant as well.

Scrubs is Meme-tastic

2006-12-17T15:22:00.000Z

Ever worried that one of your favourite comedies has been on television a bit too long? The same characters, telling the same jokes...

The TV show Scrubs has produced a voice-over homage to the Charlie Brown's Christmas - the animated special that has been played on TV in North America every Christmas for the last four decades or so.

Mildly amusing, easy to pass on, easy to broadcast, benefiting from celebrity and existing cultural references.

This is meme-tastic

Meme-tastic Project

2006-12-17T14:39:00.001Z

I've decided to start keeping a little record of online marketing or content that is meme-tastic.

A meme is, roughly, a unit of knowledge. Memetics is the study of how memes are passed between people.

People, for instance, know they should plan ahead in part because of:

'a stitch in time saves nine'

'an ounce of prevention saves a pound of cure'

These are good ideas that have an elegant oral/cultural vehicle that passes them along. They're meme-tastic (I've made that up I think - out of laziness more than anything else).

My interest in this subject is partly due to the fact that it's a point of intersection of traditional and emerging advertising. Mark Ritson has done some really interesting work about how advertising effectiveness is drawn significantly from how people interact with messaging culturally - whether they ignore it or talk about it.

There's a belief around the office at the moment that the best medium for broadcasting advertising that makes people talk is television. While this may not be entirely true (there are an increasing number of internet-based memes that people have in common), it is still mostly true. The exception in advertising (as opposed to PR) is online viral advertising - a sub-industry that needs a lot of work.

Memetics is roughly related to viral advertsing. There are virals that are meme-tastic and there are virals that make everybody work a bit too hard. Bad virals sacrifice brand values in order to gain a foothold with an initial user and then over-incentivise people to spam their friends. A meme-tastic viral is worth sharing for its own sake and helps build a brand, attaching positive associations with the brand.

The aim of my 'project' is to put together a list of good and bad examples for future reference. These won't necessarily be viral campaigns. There are two kinds of 'meme-tastic' communication.

The first is where the idea/concept is brilliant or interesting - it fits perfectly with a social situation, a brand or a zeitgeist and people just want to pass it on. Take, for example, the way that everybody knows that Dell Laptop batteries have been blowing up, or how for six weeks this fall people have been saying 'Yagshemesh.'

The second kind of meme-tastic communication is for idea/concepts that are a little bit more banal but where the communication is facilitated by a cunning mass communicator or a piece of technology.

If you have any good examples I'd love to hear about them.

Technorati Find

2006-12-16T15:50:00.000Z

MC Hammer has a blog . Its most notable feature is that he signs off every post with "Hammertime".

Pilot Podcast

2006-12-11T22:14:00.000Z

We've done a small test with video podcasting via an online publisher that went live last week on the VNU network in Germany. HP has licensed what sounds like a nice piece of kit. It's a mouse that sits and charges in the pc card slot of notebooks and is bluetooth. VNU filmed a short review of the product and has posted it to a number of their sites.

I suspect that, in the near future, this kind of initiative will go through PR agencies rather than media agencies. I think, though, that this little mini-campaign wil be a pretty cost-effective media buy. Advertisers are, on the whole, probably paying over the odds to drive people to their websites in order to deliver content to them. Video streaming in ads has been possible for quite a while but the barriers to execution were relatively numerous. You Tube, Daily Motion & Google Video have had a big impact on the feasibility of syndicating video and it's a great opportunity for advertisers.

HP Bluetooth PC-Card Maus
Uploaded by gizmodo-de

Zeddigital Conference

2006-12-11T21:53:00.000Z

I spent a couple of days in Marrakech last week at a 'summit' attended by representatives of many of our offices around the world. As an advertising network we're really picking up some steam. Unfortunately, I missed most of the sessions due to a meeting on the first day of the conference - Marrakech isn't that easy to get to, even from London.

There were a couple of highlights from my half-day of sessions though.

One was a presentation by Joel Lunenfeld, who's a SVP at Moxie Interactive a US-based full service digital agency that was recently acquired by Publicis Groupe. They have a strong client list and are doing some great work, joining up creative, media, web development and data mining. I'm sure that there will be lots of opportunities to learn from them.

The other highlight was having a chat with Jarek Sosinski, a digital planner in our Polish office. Poland is a really interesting market to keep an eye on. It's rapidly growing into an economic contender and the impact is definitely being felt in the online advertising business. Jarek was telling me, though, that there are very few 'global' online brands operating effectively in Poland. Audiences are large and growing and usage is high but the only non-Polish brand that has succeeded in imposing itself is Google.

I get the impression that Poles like to do things there own way - if sites don't develop Polish versions (English still isn't common for adults there) then they're sufficiently entrepreneurial to develop their own content. They have, for instance, their own portals, their own advertising formats and their own instant messenger technology.

The market forces in Poland are such that things are developing at different paces than in other markets. Of all our offices they are the most experienced at engaging in forums and bulletin boards (i.e. User Generated Content 0.9). They're currently planning a campaign for one of our UK clients, advertising bank accounts to Poles planning to move to London.

Jarek and I also had a chuckle about Windows Vista - depending on the anti-piracy coding in it Poland may well adopt it faster then any other market in Europe.

A snapshot of London Web

2006-12-11T18:55:00.000Z

I had a pretty useful day of meetings yesterday with a client who was in town for a couple of days. He has a remit to test emerging media channels for marketing.

We spent the day with people and companies that are ahead of the curve when it comes to embracing the development of the web. There is, I think, a lot of innovation going on in the UK and much of it is proving fruitful.

We met with Google to talk about what they're doing beyond search.

We spent some time with Katie Lee from Shiny Media . They're a group of Blogs that have posted some impressive figures with what has got to be an attractive audience to the right advertisers. There has been a lot of talk about how the internet 'democratises' publishing. Most of this talk is bumph but I think that Shiny are a great example of when it is true. With three permanent staff and freelance writers they've tracked 2.3m visitors in November. I wonder what ITV.com gets....

Euan Semple spent about an hour with us talking about some of his experiences with using social computing as Knowledge Management and Internal Communications solutions. He's not, as far as I can tell, a technology expert but, more importantly, has gained considerable experience at overcoming the barriers and identifying the opportunities that organisations are faced with when they seek to implement these tools.

Our final session was at the VNU UK offices in Soho. IT sites generally are responding bullishly to the way the internet is changing and VNU is no exception. They've been investing in video, developing new features, updating CMS, podcasts, etc... They're likely benefiting substantially from a couple of solid years of ad sales and also feeling the pressure to respond to changing platforms.

All in all, it was a good day. A nice cross-section, by no means exhaustive, of a booming industry that is adapting quickly.

Real World Wide Web

2006-11-19T20:18:00.000Z

I was in a meeting with Tim Kindberg this week. He works for HP in research and development at the HP Labs in Bristol. One of his projects is physical hyperlinks. This is by no means a new technology - it's already been put to use by the BBC and won an award.

The idea is that physical objects could have a unique barcode printed on them that can be photographed by a mobile phone. The image leads to a unique reference point on the web which contains information. The technology was used as part of the BBC series Coast. Scenic walks were marked with posters that included these tags and linked to various pieces of information. You can learn more on the Active Print site.

There are a couple of barriers to this technology taking off. Having seen it in action, though, I'm much more convinced than I was. Properly integrated into phones it could be very easy to use and very useful. The phone tells you when you've succeeded in capturing the barcode - a major plus for usability.

There are, by the sounds of it, two major hurdles. The first is getting the appropriate software embedded into phones. The second is standardisation of codes.

This technology has all kinds of possible applications. The 'barcode' could, in theory, execute any number of activities on a phone. It could probably replace phone numbers on business cards, for instance.

It could definitely act as an easily traceable response mechanic on outdoor and ambient advertising. It could add real value to consumers and be easily trackable for media spend optimisation.

Some of the ideas that Tim covered were:

real time travel information at bus stops and on train platforms

in-store promotions

response mechanism on outdoor

incentive delivery on outdoor to increase footfall

map download from online to mobile

If you have another one, please feel free to comment...

Gartner Hype Cycle

2006-11-18T18:16:00.000Z

Has the buzz about Second Life been annoying you? There's a conceptual framework called the Hype Cycle developed by Gartner that I find useful most weeks at helping me figure out my views on 'hot' technology news.

To be honest, I'm not sure how much rigour is behind it and I doubt that it's useful for definitive planning. It's extremely useful, however, in helping to maintain perspective, especially on new technologies.

The fundamental concept is that most or all technologies go through five phases of development that see the level of hype peak long before the technologies themselves become useful. Between excitement and usefulness there is a period where most people are decidedly underwhelmed by the technology.

If you take the mobile internet as an example, it was developed some years ago as a concept and there was a lot of excitement. This rapidly dissipated when people realised that WAP was really unimpressive and that no-one would be bothered with it. Now, WAP in its various forms is starting to make a comeback as phones have improved and people have found useful things to do with it.

I'd highly recommend reading through the concept and then doing a little search search of the interweb to see what people have posted (neglecting copyright of course).

Back to Second Life - companies that are making PR announcements or set up virtual shops in Second Life at the moment are very much taking advantage of the fact that the level of hype is extremely high. The vast majority of the value gained from these endeavours comes from association with the hype. There will be a severe drop in people's interest and the value to be gained from Second Life before there is any sustained interest from the 'general populaton'.

Second Life

2006-11-18T17:41:00.000Z

There's been a lot of talk about Second Life recently. I wonder what the ratio is between people who've heard of it and people who have actually played with it (or, for that matter, people who have actually bought Linden Dollars).

Second Life has managed to sell some pretty significant companies into giving them free PR. Reuters, Sun Microsystems and IBM have all made something of a big deal about being associated with Second Life.

A lot of their success, I think, comes from the fact that the concept encapsulates so many different elements of the new web. It gives a physical (if virtual) dimension to web technologies and habits as varied as online gaming, instant messaging, chat rooms, Pay Pal and eBay for example.

I feel like it's pretty safe to say that in its current form Second Life will never become 'mainstream'. The future of the web lies in its cross-over with the real world, not it's ability to make a virtual one.

I do think that it's a step towards a viable replacement for conference calls (and instant messaging and chat rooms for that matter).

I think it's worth mentioning that my former colleague, Barry Lee , is sufficiently bleeding edge that he was presenting 3-D net meetings as an exciting development about a year ago...

Online Art

2006-11-18T17:18:00.000Z

My cousin Daniel recently completed a Masters of Fine Arts at the Chelsea College of Art and Design. Since moving to London five years ago I've enjoyed following his various art projects - he brings a kind of whimsy to his work that I really appreciate.

He recently hosted a week-long art event on a small island off the coast of Croatia called Susak. Apparently it's a beautiful and somewhat isolated place. I've lifted some text from a forum site about the island:

THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING WRONG WITH THE PEOPLE LIVING ON THE ISLAND!!!!! (I can't seem to stress this one out enough)

So all of you that hear things about deliverance-type of weirdos and shit about mutants - You've been tricked. I can guarantee you that the percentage of strange people is far lower than in the town where you're comming from.

IF YOU WANT FREAKS, GO TO THE FUCKING CIRCUS.

The island doesn't really have roads so the all the locals have wheelbarrows to cart their things around. Daniel made a t-shirt inspired by this which you can buy from his site . During the Susak Expo Daniel undertook a project to paint as many of the wheelbarrows as possible bright orange. There are some great photos here . I'd particularly recommend clicking on the photo on the right of the old guy.

Daniel has invited me to collaborate with him in a project yet-to-be-defined. Hopefully we can think of something cool...

Divining Rods III - Pôle Nord

2006-11-06T23:25:00.000Z

The acquisition of Pôle Nord by Publicis Groupe is very much of today's media zeitgeist. Not entirely unlike Rupert Murdoch's spate of acquisitions, it is 'old' advertising learning from new.

Pôle Nord as a company has earned its stripes by servicing e-commerce companies. For those of us who have worked in online marketing for established companies, this is an impressive place to prove yourself. Established companies tend to be burdened by complexities of multiple corporate objectives and legacy systems. E-commerce, typically, has a sharp focus on a single bottom line - delivering the maximum return on what is usually almost 100% online spend through a single sales channel.

This is the smithy at which Pôle Nord's tools were forged. As a result, they are very exciting. Word Catcher delivers unparalleled insights into SEM effectiveness charting brands against competitors within key categories in terms of volume of search terms and position on the listings.

Click 2 Sale is sufficiently flexible that it is an ideal divining rod . It's an automated bid management tool that works with APIs and javascript coding to create a platform which allows advertisers to maximise their investment by delivering as much relevance as possible - matching a wide variety of 'post-click actions' to keyword data with sufficient ease that marketers can devote their time to adding the human touches which are so important to real relevance.

The future of marketing will be when machines do jobs appropriate for machines, humans do jobs appropriate for humans and the rigour of e-commerce marketing meets the magic of 'old' advertising.

Divining Rods II - Attentio

2006-11-06T23:13:00.000Z

I met today with Per Siljubergsåsen, one of the co-founders of Attentio . I first learned about Attentio from an interview of another co-founder called Simon McDermott on Podleaders , a series of podcasts that I'd highly recommend.

Attentio is one of the tools that promise to deliver on the promises that remained undelivered-upon at the end of the last web boom. It has the potential (along with, presumably, its still small competitive set) to effective online consumer feedback the norm rather then the exception. It does so through facilitating the process of listening. It aggregates feeds from a careful selection of sources and gives a good snapshot of different web 'channels' (eg. news, blogs, forums...)

The tool, in theory, allows a marketer to use a single interface to have a dashboard quantitative view of the buzz relating to a product or brand online and then to drill down to the qualitative - individual entries. It also aggregates volumes of postings relating to pre-set topics of discussion and identifies new themes.

The tool in action seems to have more strengths than weaknesses and their business model looks like it has an interesting future. It looks like it has very good applications for tracking the effectiveness of marketing initiatives as the focus towards word of mouth (mouse) increases. It also has a lot of potential for feeding into product development.

Divining Rods

2006-11-06T23:00:00.000Z

I saw three commercial proprietary tools for Web 2.0 in action today. The first two were developed by Pole Nord - a company acquired by the Publicis Groupe (my employers) last year. The third was developed by Attentio , a Brussels-based start up that aggregates online content into a 'buzz tracking' tool. All three were great examples of how it's relatively easy to develop ground-breaking tools in online marketing.

In each case the tools differentiate themselves from the competition by facilitating the manipulation of data in order to provide actionable insights (how 'bout that for marketing speak).

There is far too much data in the digital world and not enough insights. Great tools (and people who know who to use them) are too few and far between.

Minor SEO Win

2006-11-05T12:29:00.000Z

I'm feeling very smug about my neo-logism. It will be a long time before Google recognises it as a word unto itself, in the meantime I'm happy to be top of the listings for people who search on "e-pisteme".

Digital Integrated Marketing

2006-10-29T17:19:00.000Z

As part of the training sessions we had with him last week Mark Ritson led us through a case study about Walmart. Opinion is pretty divided about the values of Walmart but one of the things that they do undeniably well is information systems.

There was an example of how customer data allowed them to discover that when a hurricane warnings increased sales of strawberry Poptarts dramatically. Their systems are so good that not only could they identify this trend, they were able to respond to it and ship more Poptarts to the appropriate locations. I have a cousin who used to run the supply chain for Green & Black's chocolate and he had a similar anecdote about Tesco's here in the UK. He loved doing business with them as a result.

E-businesses have known for a long time that there is invaluable data in analytics and adserving spreadsheets. As online advertising grows and increases in importance, companies that have had little direct contact with their end-users have the opportunity to take advantage of new 'touchpoints'.

There is so much data in online advertising that it's easy to get swamped by it and I've yet to come across an over-resourced web team. One of the things that I'm most looking forward to in my new job is unearthing the hidden insights that this data holds.

Digital Integrated Advertising - A Case Study

2006-10-29T16:58:00.000Z

When I created 'Digital Integrated Advertising' as a tag a week ago I intended to use it as a description for a trend that I see as rapidly increasing. Online and mobile advertising have, at least in the UK, remained relatively silo-ed, apart from other channels. First mover advertisers have made attempts to run campaigns that join up digital and non-digital media, with SMS response or strong websites for instance. Digital channels, though, have mostly existed in parallel to other channels - either online driving traffic to a website or building up the frequency of messaging of an offline campaign.

There are few campaigns that have succeeded in recognising that increasingly all parts of our life our digital. Last year, working with a number of agencies, we ran a successful and elegant campaign with British Airways that blurred these lines. We took excellent content that had been developed for a microsite about 'hidden gems' in London and developed it into a mobile guide to the city. This guide became part of an advertising campaign that ran in advertorials in Metro Newspapers across Europe and was also a very popular part of the microsite.

It's really hard to quantify the impact that this element of the campaign had, or qualify it for that matter. But here's why I think it was award-worthy (it won an NMA Effectiveness Award and probably should have won more).

it can only have helped BA build its reputation as a forward-thinking, premium brand. Unfortunately there wasn't a great deal of quantitative evidence for this apart from its popularity as part of the microsite.

people are still downloading the guide from the microsite

almost all marketing research points to word of mouth as a key influencer. Having portable content on a mobile phone probably contributed to hundreds or thousands of conversations about travelling to London around Europe

we gave potential customers something of value out of advertising

it was an efficient recycling of content

Media 2.0

2006-10-29T16:45:00.000Z

There's a really interesting short essay from March 2006 on UX Magazine, a great little site that doesn't seem to publish often enough.

The essay is called 'This is Media 2.0' and is a good review and set of predictions about the impact of Web 2.0 on media. In Media 2.0 there are opportunities for publishers who act as platforms for user generated content.

Like most of Web 2.0 talk it sounds an awful lot like 1999 all over again. In fact, like most Web 2.0, there's a good reason for that - it's taken this long to get this far.

Troy Young, the author, makes some good points and it's worth a read. It isn't exactly cutting edge now that YouTube is ubiquitous but it was written in March 2006 and so seems relatively prescient. He makes some predictions, one of which fits well with some of the work we're doing as an advertising agency:

Media 2.0 companies will look to partner with brands, beyond selling audience, to offer value to community members. Media 2.0 will provide valuable opportunities for user research. Less reach, more partnership / affiliation.

Planting Change on Widsets

2006-10-29T16:18:00.000Z

I recently discovered Widsets . It's a relatively modest site of uncertain origin that is doing something cool and relatively new. It's a bit like AvantGo 2.0. You download a client to your mobile phone and then you're able to subscribe to RSS feeds. They've also made it easy to publish your own feed.

It's similar to a service in the UK that's been advertising on South West Trains (Commuter trains in part of London) called Mobizines . Mobizines also involves downloading a client to your phone and then subscribing to content. You can, by the looks of it, also subscribe to RSS feeds but the majority of the 'pitch' is towards established media brands like GQ and Glamour. The Widset client feels much leaner than the Mobizine one and loads more quickly and smoothly on my Nokia N80.

I'm not sure how much I'll use the Widset client on my mobile but it looks like I have 5 subscriptions to my RSS feed (5 more than via the standard internet). I don't expect anyone to actually read the feed but you never know.

I've you're interested you should check it out:

My own neo-logism

2006-10-27T23:23:00.000+01:00

It just occurred to me to search "e-pisteme". I'm really pleased with the word.

I've carried out a Google search and there were no relevant listings.
I also Yahoo!ed it to the same effect.
And Wikipedia-ed it.
Technorati turned up a blog called: http://giligil.blogspot.com/ that includes e-pisteme in a long list of e-words but it's since disappeared.
Icerocket has turned up a total blank.
Google Blogsearch has spotted http://giligil.blogspot.com/ along with my cunning link-farm ploy of using a disused photo moblog (it had a great deal of potential) to link to my neo-logism.

If it wasn't for the almost complete lack of my SEO abilities I'd be 100% pleased about this.
Roll over Baudrillard

I'm starting to get this blogging thing

2006-10-27T22:08:00.000+01:00

Having taken spent many hours over the last couple years coaxing people through the complexities of online advertising, SEM and mobile marketing I feel like I'm pretty well placed to spot a communication technology epiphany. I've just had one. In theory I've known about blogs for a long time.

I could appreciate that blogs, spamming aside, fit somewhere along a spectrum. At one end are the millions of failed spurts of creativity that result in 1-5 unread posts on a forgotten blog (I can claim three of these). At the other end are the online media brands that just happen to use blogging software as their platform (eg. Gawker, Cute Overload, etc..). I knew that there were plenty of variations in between but I figured that they were mostly people talking about niche interests or about blogging. I still think I was right but mostly missing the point.

In a post that I found in an appropriately blogospherical way (through a trackback on a post I enjoyed), Chris Thilk has put together a really nice precis of the better understanding that I've come to this week.

Blogging gave me a voice. It gave people like me a voice. Part of me couldn't believe it. I had a voice. I could talk about what I wanted, what movies I was watching, what irritated me about Illinois politics and any thing else that flitted through my mind.

Old me says, "Brilliant bud, didn't you realise that you could bore people even more easily in the real world?" New me says, "Hold on, I'm reading this and it's interesting. I don't know this guy and I'll never meet him. This is an interesting 'conversation' that wouldn't have happened without blogging.

I've been initiated. People don't just gain a voice in blogosphere, they also find ears - their own and those of others. The gaining of the voice is interesting too - in real life I'm relatively apprehensive about appearing self-involved. I'm not saying it's necessarily a good thing (it's still TBD) but this blog seems to be freeing me of that apprehension.

And the reason that people blog so much about blogging (or podcast about podcasting for that matter) is that it is significant. In 'old media' you needed to step away from the technology in order to discuss the content (eg. Seinfeld chats at the watercooler). In 'new media' you need to step into the technology in order to discuss the content, and while you're in there you might as well talk about the technology itself.

Epistemological Shift

2006-10-25T21:15:00.000+01:00

I've been reading some research written by Mark Ritson in the lead up to some training he's doing for us at ZO tomorrow.

It's great to see some words from my good old University days. It's not everyday you come across epistemological or ontological. It makes me feel like my degree was more than just fun.

I need to spend some time thinking about blogs with an 'epistemologists' hat on and see if I can come up with something interesting to say. There is definitely a paucity of metaphors/analogies to deal with the complexities of blogging. I might save that one for a rainy day though.

HP Blogging right?

2006-10-25T21:06:00.000+01:00

I just left a comment on a blog set up on HP.com by Eric Kintz , a VP of marketing strategy at HP.

It looks like a really good initiative - a good way to get HP marketers thinking about the blogosphere. Most impressively, he invited a guy from Lenovo to comment. I've yet, though, to see anyone crack the complexity of blogging.

One of the things that I find the most interesting about digital advertising is that the subtlest technological changes can have huge impacts. The difference between a blog and a website is not altogether huge but the impact is massive. Websites have changed the 'media landscape'. Blogs, though, change the communications landscape, which is a shift of a different order altogether.

Tired Metaphors I - The Purchase Funnel

2006-10-24T22:39:00.000+01:00

I'm working on a different way of approaching the concept of the 'purchase funnel'. I don't know if I'm just bored of talking about it or whether it's actually an oversimplification people's behaviour. I'm almost certain, though, that there is a 'friendlier' way for marketers to conceptualise their customer relationships (or webmasters their site traffic for that matter).

Steve Ballmer, Motivational Speaker

2006-10-23T20:49:00.000+01:00

I saw Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, speak at a Digital Advertising conference in London last week. He didn't say anything new or particularly exciting. He's a great speaker though, with more than a passing resemblance to classic Saturday Night Live Chris Farley character - Matt Foley, Motivational Speaker.

The Passion Spectrum

2006-10-22T21:00:00.000+01:00

Kathy Sierra who is, apparently an eminent commentator on 'Web 2.0' recently wrote a post referring to another post written by Scott Adams (the Dilbert cartoonist - evidently also a blogger).

Scott wrote that, in polling consumer opinion, the 'kiss of death' for a product or concept is indifference or mild approval. He says, relatively convincingly, that you're better off having a spectrum of passionate opinions, even if most of them are negative, as long as some of them are passionately positive.

"The opposite of love," one of my flatmates in University once told me, in reference to relationships, "isn't hate. It's indifference."

In the UK, Unilever are again making use of this spectrum of passions in an ad campaign for Marmite. They've gone as far as building a site devoted to what might be considered a 'basic' food stuff.

I'm not sure whether I should be pleased or annoyed that they've included an online drawing tool. This is an online fad, presumably born partly due to an advancement in Flash, that I've been cataloguing with some amusement.

There are, however, (literally) innumerable products for which people are mostly or entirely indifferent but buy anyway.

A broad spectrum of passions, I suppose, delivers inherent brand equity. This is a nice plus to a marketer but by no means a requirement.

Planting Change

2006-10-22T20:39:00.000+01:00

The more information available to us, the more effort it takes to organise it.

This blog is, to a certain extent, an exercise in organisation. It's an attempt to:

develop a portable reference to the paradigms that define marketing communications in 2006 and onward

build a set of conceptual frameworks that help businesses respond to changes in technology