cheeky visiony movie about future display experience
FriendFeed - iancrocombe
listening to
dirty, nasty, blogs
Distributed network
- Ian's YouTube channel
family and friends, mainly video postcards from Spain - Five Pound Lunch
is there no such thing as a cheap lunch? - secondlife
Lateral Steinhoff - del.icio.us
bookmarks for digital nerds - flickr
pics of family and friends
March 07, 2010
February 21, 2010
Your marketing needs to start working in REAL TIME
Interesting discussions with my planning colleagues at AKQA London over the last couple of weeks about "Nowism".
In an era of live breaking 24hour Sky News, Facebook news feeds and Chat Roulette (NSFW: http://chatroulette.com/) consumers aren't waiting patiently for advertisers to broadcast their messages. If we want to get cut through with an audience who is always connected, marketers & advertisers need to act in REAL TIME. Superbowl 2010 gave some good examples of how tier 1 advertisers are tackling REAL TIME in big campaigns by using TV to drive fans and chatter on Facebook fan pages http://mashable.com/2010/02/04/social-media-super-bowl/ But what about the rest of the year? What about the bits in between the 6 week bursts? Marketing departments need to shift from commissioning marketing to actually engaging their audiences themselves in REAL TIME.January 31, 2010
January 27, 2010
June 10, 2009
Ham not Spam
Email is known as the "workhorse" of Direct Marketing beacuse of its wide usage across all demographics, ease of implementation and good ROI. It has also become a victim of its own success as it is cheap and easy to flood consumers inboxes with irrelevant messages.
Everyone talks about seducing consumers with timely, relevant messaging, but have a look at your own inbox and see if you feel loved.So how can you make sure your communications are seen as Ham and not Spam?
Technical (the easy bit)
Deliverability is still a major challenge, especially
for verticals like gambling and healthcare which create false positives for
spam. Brands need to develop best practise templates which show the ISPs they
are credible and playing by the rules. While good quality ESPs proactively
manage the relationship with ISPs and list holders, brands should monitor their
campaign delivery rates and investigate sudden changes.
Relevance (the harder bit)
Brands need to demonstrate the value of their emails
to get permission to communicate and maintain relevance with their email base. Consumers
classify unwanted email they have signed up for as Spam. It’s easy to flag an
item as junk from an email client and this action feeds back into filtering
applications, making each of your future emails harder to deliver.
Consumers value service messaging which gives
confirmation, dispatch and delivery notifications when they order products and
this is a good place to start a relationship. The initial
motivation for allowing brands to communicate expires quickly and you need to
provide new value to keep consumers engaged.
In summary, make sure you've got the technical stuff under control and start thinking about how to maintain relevance on an ongoing basis.
March 28, 2009
Calls to Conversation
Emails are a simple marketing tool which brands are pretty comfortable using. Every time they send a blast out they see a spike in traffic and conversions.
I spotted this nice “call to conversation” on an email from online art store Eyestorm. Rather than using the “visit our website, book a test drive” sign off associated with traditional brands in digital channels, Eyestorm have focused their energy on deepening their digital relationship.
Obviously it helps if you have an active & relevant profile in a conversation space. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see more traditional brands taking this approach during 2009.
Why brands should consider the video conversation
Lauren Luke is the 27 year old single mum from South Shields whose make up tips are watched by a global audience of millions on YouTube.
She ditched her job in a taxi firm 18 months ago and started selling makeup over eBay. She was answering so many questions about applying her products by email, that she started to create video demonstrations on YouTube.
These videos were shot in a bedroom, produced with a laptop and webcam have had over 5million views. A typical clip will run for 10 minutes, have 100k+ views and 1k+ comments. Fast forward 18 months and Lauren is launching her own makeup range and writes a weekly column for the Guardian.
Stories like these have been a feature of YouTube since it launched in early 2005. Semi-pro filmmakers could film a few scenes on a mini DV video camera in the morning, plug the cable into their computer and use free software like imovie to make a 3 minute video promo to upload to YouTube that evening.The reason that video is going to explode into the mass market in 2009 is that the means of production have been simplified.
The recent Cadburys Livebrow MPU extended their dancing eyebrows TV campaign by letting users film themselves using their webcam and submit it via the Flash MPU into a competition.
Its easy to capture and upload video from most modern mobile phones, but the hot video product at the moment is the Flip Minos camera. It costs £99, uses solid state storage, a built a built in USB connection and has a simple workflow that lets you publish to YouTube on the click of a button. Cisco are hoping that this will be the perfect device to go mass market and democratise video. They have a serious interest in high bandwidth infrastructure and purchased the parent company, pure digital last week.
In a move with a similar end result, naked conversations author and rabid video blogger Robert Scoble recently announced he’s moving to hosting company Rackspace to work on a new video network.
So if video is going to overtake text as the currency of social networks, what lessons are there for brands?
The workflow for video has been radically simplified with a variety of channels and tools for creators. My advice is to take a lesson from Lauren Luke and engage your users in a warm and honest conversation.
This post originally appeared on March 23rd 2009 on Brand Republic
March 12, 2009
March 11, 2009
Is Google “interest-based advertising” evil?
At the Digital Britain keynote a couple of weeks back Peter Bazalgette (ex Endemol) said "The truth is that not a single media company knows what its model will be in ten years' time." His vision of a content model for publishers was that "In future all content will be paid for either by people's attention spans or their personal data".
Internet users refuse to pay for mainstream content and services, preferring to substitute a worse free version rather than shell out for micropayments or subscriptions. The challenge with ad-funded models is that the advertising is not valuable enough to pay for the content or services. Increasing the relevance of advertising means that publishers can charge more for relevant placements, which generate higher conversions and ultimately better ROI for brands.
Enter Google, with their announcement of a new service “interest-based advertising” a polite way of describing their behavioural targeting platform.
Behavioural targeting has been a hot topic for digital strategists. We’ve been leveraging the personalised communications which we carry out through other channels into website experiences with tools like Omniture’s Touch Clarity for many years. But taking information we’ve learnt from one site and applying it to adverts on another (“cross domain”) has raised privacy and legal issues.
Google are the masters of digital relevance, their Adword PPC product put relevant ads next to search results for active seekers. Their Adsense product puts these Adwords onto content partner sites, this time matching the site content. This is great for the low hanging fruit, but after last years acquisition of DoubleClick. Google is focusing on display advertising, to stimulate demand.
Google has been laying the foundations for this, on the 3rd of March they collaborated with the IAB to launch “Good Practice Principles”, the UK’s first self-regulatory guidelines to set good practice for companies that collect and use data for online behavioural advertising purposes.
While Google’s new offering has an “opt out” option in line with the IAB best practise, the mass market know that their data is being used, but can’t be bothered to opt out.
Other practitioners of behavioural targeting such as Phorm are about as popular as a spammer at a Tweetup. Will this move put a dent in netizens perception of Google as a brand, looks like we'll have to wait a bit until the come up top in organic results for "pure evil".
