Look, all I'm doing is telling you about this - it in no way implies that anyone reading this working in an ad agency is a loser. Honest.
Iain Tait has finally completed his magnum opus, 10 reasons why digital is better than advertising. From the start, they are:
I particularly like this quote, from reason no. 10:
Of course there are brilliant people in advertising who ‘get it’ too. And blatantly you don’t have to be a web-obsessed geek to come up with interesting interactive ideas. But naturally it becomes easier to consider this world if you spend some time in it. So, at the very least, you understand a few of its basic rules. It helps to appreciate what makes a great game. Or be able to feel the difference between a good application and a lousy one. To understand how important online relationships are to people. To have lived a day in Second Life before recommending it as the solution to a problem. To be a user who generates content and not a marketeer who just hypothesises about it. The list goes on… They wouldn’t survive in a place where their Internet access was subject to WPP Group firewalls (although they’d probably hack a way around it). They need to be allowed to run instant messenger and install applications on their own machines.
Of course there are brilliant people in advertising who ‘get it’ too. And blatantly you don’t have to be a web-obsessed geek to come up with interesting interactive ideas. But naturally it becomes easier to consider this world if you spend some time in it. So, at the very least, you understand a few of its basic rules.
It helps to appreciate what makes a great game. Or be able to feel the difference between a good application and a lousy one. To understand how important online relationships are to people. To have lived a day in Second Life before recommending it as the solution to a problem. To be a user who generates content and not a marketeer who just hypothesises about it. The list goes on…
They wouldn’t survive in a place where their Internet access was subject to WPP Group firewalls (although they’d probably hack a way around it). They need to be allowed to run instant messenger and install applications on their own machines.
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Following on from Monday's warning shots in the Guardian, (and my last post) comes news of MindShare stealing the limelight from BBH and Dare:
Unilever brand Lynx has launched an online ad campaign letting consumers manipulate its marketing material.The brand has channelled its huge marketing spend into an extension of its 'Bom chicka wah wah' campaign through a deal with Yahoo!-owned online editing provider Jumpcut.With the incentive of a trip to Miami to meet pin-up Kelly Brook and be crowned the Ultimate Lynx Player, users have been invited to edit Lynx's professionally produced content, such as exclusive footage from TV ads, and submit it to a judging panel.The results of the experiment will provide an insight into the level of involvement people desire with big brands and FMCGs in particular.MindShare Beta, the media agency's innovations arm, was behind the campaign. Jo Lyall, managing partner at MindShare Interaction, said the results will give Lynx valuable intelligence on how people interact with the brand."Lynx is looking to see how many people want to get more involved with the brand," she said. "Its campaigns have always been engaging but this is an extra step. The days of simply putting up a banner ad have gone; this is about discovering how far hardcore users will interact as well as tracking how many people choose to view and pass on this type of content."The campaign follows MindShare's creation of a MySpace profile for the brand last year. Both campaigns are planned as markers of how much user involvement Lynx should rely on in future campaigns.
Unilever brand Lynx has launched an online ad campaign letting consumers manipulate its marketing material.
The brand has channelled its huge marketing spend into an extension of its 'Bom chicka wah wah' campaign through a deal with Yahoo!-owned online editing provider Jumpcut.
With the incentive of a trip to Miami to meet pin-up Kelly Brook and be crowned the Ultimate Lynx Player, users have been invited to edit Lynx's professionally produced content, such as exclusive footage from TV ads, and submit it to a judging panel.
The results of the experiment will provide an insight into the level of involvement people desire with big brands and FMCGs in particular.
MindShare Beta, the media agency's innovations arm, was behind the campaign. Jo Lyall, managing partner at MindShare Interaction, said the results will give Lynx valuable intelligence on how people interact with the brand.
"Lynx is looking to see how many people want to get more involved with the brand," she said. "Its campaigns have always been engaging but this is an extra step. The days of simply putting up a banner ad have gone; this is about discovering how far hardcore users will interact as well as tracking how many people choose to view and pass on this type of content."
The campaign follows MindShare's creation of a MySpace profile for the brand last year. Both campaigns are planned as markers of how much user involvement Lynx should rely on in future campaigns.
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Want to know what the big media agencies are advising their clients about digital?
Well, it's your lucky day. In the spirit of Web 2.0, Simon Andrews, the Digital Chief Strategy Officer for Mindshare, has released GroupM's latest report in their This Year Next Year series, Interaction - All change: marketing in addressable media, on his blog.
It's well worth a read in full, but here's a nice snippet:
Seven questions every time we plan: If we are building an interactive destination what do we want to happen when a consumer visits? How much is that action worth to us and how many times does that action need to be repeated to justify the investment? What are we trying to measure; how will we gather data; what should we do with it? How will we be sure that the user knows more about us as a result of being engaged: are we allowing the consumer to participate or are we just making a speech? Are we giving consumers tools which allow them to interact with us and to distribute our messages among their own communities? How are we reacting to a consumer who is searching in our category and thus declaring his or her intent? How do we influence what is searched for? How do we ensure that any search in category finds us, and ensure that the content to which that search result links is specifically relevant to the search itself? How are we influencing the consumer’s propensity to buy?
Seven questions every time we plan:
Gaming is the fastest growing form of entertainment, with a global audience of nearly half a billion people, yet it’s been reported that UK adspend is currently under £10 million. This report from the Internet Advertising Bureau assess the opportunities for advertisers within the gaming space.
Marketing has a good article covering the UK's digital outdoor market:
Digital accounts for just 3% of the £933m out-of-home market in the UK, but this proportion is expected to grow to almost 5% this year. In essence, digital panels take the outdoor offering forward on four fronts. First, the medium makes out-of-home more targeted and immediate. Second, it allows agencies to add complex moving images to their executions. Third, it encourages consumer interaction, and last, it allows advertising messages to be juxtaposed with editorial content.
Click here more coverage of digital outdoor on Advertising 2.0.
For those luddite colleagues and clients of yours
[via]
or belief systems are small clumsy rolling-type creatures
Does not seem to be going to plan:
The Bartle Bogle Hegarty head of digital production, Michelle Stanhope, has left the agency without a job to go to. Stanhope joined BBH in February from glue London, where she was the head of production.
Anyone know what's going on?
Previous coverage here.
The winners of March's Creative Showcase have been announced. Go check them out...
I popped along to the sold out and packed out PR Unspun last night, organised by Chinwag Live - aside from the perilous state of the air conditioning, it was a an interesting event covering how the PR industry needs to come to terms with the rise of social media.
It was nice to bump into some familiar faces from Web 1.0, and as usual, half the value of the event was chatting to people afterwards.
Anyway, their next event is Media Widgetised on Wed 16th May, running as part of Widget Week, which will look at how the growth of widgets, aggregators and web-feeds effect the online media landscape. I'd book early if I were you...
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Mike Weston:
simply sending out an email at exactly the same as each subscriber originally opted in to receiving that marketing message can produce a 20 per cent increase in click through rates; a 65 per cent increase in conversion rates and a 45 per cent increase in value of order. But maybe this is the key number that gets your attention: It also contributes to a 187 per cent increase in the overall average revenue
Will this happen here?
Accessing the internet on Japan's mobile phones has become so fast and easy that many young people have forsaken computers.Between 2000 and 2006, the proportion of Japanese 20-year-olds using home PCs to access the internet plummeted from 23.6 per cent to 11.9 per cent, according to figures released by Net Ratings.In Japan, gadget-obsessed 20-year-olds now have mobile phones that can surf between three high-definition PC websites at a time, handle Flash software, and download Word, Excel and PDF files at rapid speed.
Accessing the internet on Japan's mobile phones has become so fast and easy that many young people have forsaken computers.
Between 2000 and 2006, the proportion of Japanese 20-year-olds using home PCs to access the internet plummeted from 23.6 per cent to 11.9 per cent, according to figures released by Net Ratings.
In Japan, gadget-obsessed 20-year-olds now have mobile phones that can surf between three high-definition PC websites at a time, handle Flash software, and download Word, Excel and PDF files at rapid speed.
How do you quantify the effect of a social network campaign that isn't about direct response? Is it worth creating and promoting a profile page for your campaign or building that widget? Well, the answer seems to be yes.
Ad Age reports on a new study commisoned by Carat and Fox Interactive Media:
It looked at three different types of ad interactions available through MySpace: display ads, custom marketer MySpace pages, and branded profile skins and features consumers can use on their personal pages. It also measured lift in four traditional ROI metrics: intent to purchase, positive brand image, intent to recommend and unaided awareness.Rex Briggs, CEO of Marketing Evolution, which conducted the study and has also looked into social-networking ROI for marketers such as Procter & Gamble, said he hypothesized there would be value in the way people pass information around social networks, but the value would be created because people would be led back to custom brand communities or profile pages. That's how it worked in a study Mr. Briggs conducted for Phillips' "Shave Everywhere" campaign. "As it turns out, there is value created there, but that's not where the majority of the value is," he said. "It's when I take the brand, put it on my profile page and then all the people would develop a deeper meaning for what Adidas stands for because of where it stands in my own personal story." In the study, Adidas created custom skins for MySpace pages based on a new soccer cleat it was marketing. EA ran a contest on MySpace that pitted bands against each other for the opportunity to have a song appear in a new video game. In the case of EA, 70% of the people who said they'd buy the game (intent to purchase) were influenced by the viral elements or recommendations from friends. The return was so high, there was discussion that perhaps it might represent a high-water mark, Mr. Briggs said. When asked whether it skewed high because both brands are very youth-oriented, he said additional studies may be needed for older-skewing brands. The tricky part is that just being present in the social-networking space won't be enough to capture the momentum effect. Mr. Briggs noticed three attributes of the campaigns that attracted people: They gave consumers a way tell their own stories using the brand as a reference point; they gave people something to talk about; and they gave people opportunities to realize their dreams or fantasies through components such as sweepstakes and contests.
It looked at three different types of ad interactions available through MySpace: display ads, custom marketer MySpace pages, and branded profile skins and features consumers can use on their personal pages. It also measured lift in four traditional ROI metrics: intent to purchase, positive brand image, intent to recommend and unaided awareness.
Rex Briggs, CEO of Marketing Evolution, which conducted the study and has also looked into social-networking ROI for marketers such as Procter & Gamble, said he hypothesized there would be value in the way people pass information around social networks, but the value would be created because people would be led back to custom brand communities or profile pages. That's how it worked in a study Mr. Briggs conducted for Phillips' "Shave Everywhere" campaign.
"As it turns out, there is value created there, but that's not where the majority of the value is," he said. "It's when I take the brand, put it on my profile page and then all the people would develop a deeper meaning for what Adidas stands for because of where it stands in my own personal story."
In the study, Adidas created custom skins for MySpace pages based on a new soccer cleat it was marketing. EA ran a contest on MySpace that pitted bands against each other for the opportunity to have a song appear in a new video game. In the case of EA, 70% of the people who said they'd buy the game (intent to purchase) were influenced by the viral elements or recommendations from friends.
The return was so high, there was discussion that perhaps it might represent a high-water mark, Mr. Briggs said. When asked whether it skewed high because both brands are very youth-oriented, he said additional studies may be needed for older-skewing brands.
The tricky part is that just being present in the social-networking space won't be enough to capture the momentum effect. Mr. Briggs noticed three attributes of the campaigns that attracted people: They gave consumers a way tell their own stories using the brand as a reference point; they gave people something to talk about; and they gave people opportunities to realize their dreams or fantasies through components such as sweepstakes and contests.
It's that time of year again - the 2007 Webby Awards nominees have been announced and the on the 5th June, the winners will be revealed. And until Friday this week you have the chance chance to vote for the "People's Voice Award" in each category.
This year, as well as covering websites, the awards have been expanded to include interactive advertising, online film & video and mobile.
It's worth checking the nominees out as there's some nice stuff in there - although as usual, they hardly seem representative of all of the great work that's been done in the last year around the world (especially British work). I imagine this is solely because people haven't entered, rather than a sign of anything more sinister.
Oh, and before I go, Iain and James have a couple of favours to ask...
The Independent's media section has asked several advertising luminaries 'is the industry is suffering an ideas crisis?'
You can read their answers here.
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