Is this the ultimate display format?

It’s big, it’s bold, it’s comparable to the amount of ‘page’ a print ad takes up and of course it’s as interactive and measurable as any online advert before it. I give you the relatively new billboard (or double MPU... whatever you like to call it):



If it was possible to fall in love with a rectangular animated advert, I would be asking this one to marry me. It takes up almost a third of the page, is available across most large publisher sites and it actually succeeds in making the page look cleaner. For branding, personally I think this is one of the best formats on the market.

You can see the actual size of the ad (300 x 600) below. Your thoughts?



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Real change or empty rhetoric?

Earlier this week Prime Minister Gordon Brown delivered an interesting speech to the Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED) conference in Oxford.  He talked of the power of today’s technology in organising and uniting communities around the world on particular issues, such as climate change, the financial crisis or matters of foreign policy, and said that this citizen empowerment meant that we could create a “truly global society”, that foreign policy “can never be the same again” and could “no longer be run by elites”.

It was a powerful speech with some welcome words.  It wasn’t really picked up by traditional media but the world of Twitter (NB Brown's wife, Sarah, has over 440,000 followers) was alive with praise.  There was also much skepticism, including from within the audience he spoke to.  Did he really mean it?  How would he balance this ‘global citizenship’ with the national interest?  He is of course right about the empowering nature of the internet and digital communications which bridges national boundaries, people and cultures.  10 Downing Street is participating in Bebo’s Big Think to encourage users to inform our politicians about ideas for the future.

But it’s not the first time the Prime Minister has spoken about technology changing foreign policy forever.  Gordon Brown is right that global injustices and events are prevalent in our living rooms within seconds of them occurring (the best recent example being Iran).  But this ‘global citizenship’ he speaks of is a bottom-up approach.  Foreign policy – and indeed much of global policy – is governed by structures and systems that are inherently top-down.   Our representative democracy was built upon it.  Brown admitted this by suggesting that we can’t deal with environmental problems through existing institutions and that the likes of the United Nations are now out of date in dealing with foreign policy.  It remains to be seen what he would advocate instead or whether this is just empty rhetoric as we move towards a General Election next year.  However, his proposed ‘constitutional changes’ to Parliament as a result of the MP expense debacle shouldn't necessarily fill us with a whole lot of confidence.

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Eight things wrong with the internet

Digital Britain was all a bit strange to me. It had very clear, positive aims but to me it missed a lot of the bigger problems the internet is facing, instead focussing on issues that people shout about the most rather than demonstrating a genuine understanding. The problem with this is that it missed core issues that will affect the long-term use of the internet.

Over the weekend I began jotting down a list of my biggest gripes with the internet that I believe seriously need addressing. Digital Britain, understandably, couldn’t and wouldn’t be the relevant route for addressing all of these issues, but there are some it should have addressed. Hopefully the Government will look into these in the future. One step at a time and all that…

1. Traffic from search engines and social networks – traffic is such big business, that while the honest and best sites gain the long-term success, nearly every site on the internet is now guilty of cheap tricks to win instant traffic. For example, 3 years ago the BBC News site would never have had stories titled “Soho sex workers thank residents”, “Five bludgeoned in Sydney attack”.  The need to generate higher and higher levels of traffic instead of better quality traffic is reducing the quality of content on the internet. You may not think it, but this is a fundamental and massive problem.
2. User Generated Content – is, on the whole, trash content. User generated content has always been a vital part of the internet (e.g. forums, reviews, wikis etc) and it is often the most useful, but it is not a replacement for professionally produced content. Very few users will actually take the time to validate, check and source their statements. We’re becoming a society built less on fact and more on “what I think”.
3. Domain resellers – you can’t buy the names of thousands of businesses only to sell them back at extortionate rates, people shouldn’t be able to do it with domain names either.
4. Universal ID / logins – is taking too long to become a reality.
5. Badly designed websites – are still abundant and it makes the majority of websites impenetrable to the majority of users.

6. Age ratings – or lack of.
7. ViAgRa Spam – it’s still an issue, but actually less so as more people use social networks like Facebook to handle personal messaging.
8. Online display advertising – I’ve said this before, but I think the current standard ad sizes can be improved, with online display being a better proposition for advertisers and consumers if their dimensions were made larger. At the same time, I still see websites that stuff tonnes of advertising onto a page, this isn’t good either. Fewer but bigger, I think that’s a good motto.

1. Website owners, shareholders or whoever’s in charge need to understand website analytics and debunk the “more is better” reports. Find out what’s actually important and stop listening to self-promotional spiel. Otherwise our most trusted websites will be irreversibly changed for the worse.
2. Search engines will need to filter professional content from user generated content more. Perhaps a combination of Google Options markup code and a Google News style professional content approval process could be used for this purpose.
3. The Government should make it illegal for a company to exist purely to buy new domains and resell them.
4. Open ID / Facebook etc are already on the case with this, but they need to work together to ensure the best, most secure option. It would be good if they worked with the Government too to aid trust.
5. The only solution for better web design is for people to get better at it and listen to those ‘in the know’, but in a world where everyone’s suddenly an “expert” it’s harder to know who to listen to. A starting point would be to make W3C itself more accessible and understandable, and for it to do more than just advise so much on technical accessibility.
6. All of the major internet browsers could work together to produce a better method of filtering inappropriate content, and website owners could adopt a visible, universal, global age rating system.
7. Not a lot you can really do about spam, which is why we should look to social networks or even Google Wave for an alternative to remove email spam by replacing email as we know it. While these networks do have options to stop the likes of invites to use applications, people still need to be educated about these options.
8. I guess this is where the IAB comes in… time to round up the troops?

Who pays the piper?

“Compensating the artist is crucial,” said Spotify’s Jon Mitchell at last night’s Chinwag event which sought to answer the question of who would foot the bill for music in a digital world. “You’re not going to get massive new acts for nothing”, continued the sales director of the world’s favourite music streaming service.

When quizzed more about how Spotify’s model would compensate musicians, Mitchell surprised the audience by explaining that “the Premium model is going to get bigger”. This statement met some resistance from an audience of Spotify users, of whom only one would admit to having signed up to Spotify’s Premium, ad-free model.

Perhaps for this reason, Mitchell was forced to acknowledge that Spotify still had some work to do to “prove to people that there’s even more value to Premium”. As an example, Mitchell explained that access to pre-releases and exclusive content for Premium users will increase in the coming months.

In the meantime, Mitchell explained that “massive inroads” were being made on the ad-funded model, and stressed that with lead times of three to six months, industry observers should not forget that “this is not an overnight business”.

Picking up on this point, Richard Jacobs, head of radio at MediaCom, agreed that this is a fledgling sector and argued that if the smaller operators like Spotify and Last.fm are to succeed they will need to work collectively in the future to secure lucrative advertising contracts. Given the news earlier this week that Microsoft is preparing to launch a UK music streaming service to rival Spotify, this seems like very sound advice.

Getting back to the artists though, one panellist was not convinced that they are currently being suitably compensated. Helienne Lindvall, a musician and journalist responsible for the Behind The Music blog for the Guardian argued that the current model “is not working” and that smaller artists are slipping through the net.

Lindvall pointed out that the current practise of giving away free music to promote large scale tours and cash in on the resulting merchandising possibilities did not work for everyone. “Small artists who don’t make money out of merchandising suffer,” argued Lindvall. What’s more, “it costs money to tour when starting out,” she argued.

It was notable that Lindvall was the only musician on the panel. Her comments echo recent dissenting voices from within the independent sector of the record industry who argue that the free model and the promise of a direct connection between producers and consumers, assuring a constant cash flow, has not delivered the fruit that was once expected.

One such argument can be heard here where music critic Kodwo Eshun and Hyperdub label head Steve Goodman (Kode9) discuss Chris Anderson’s long tail theory which argued that the internet would be a guarantee for economic success, especially for independent producers beyond the mainstream. For Eshun and Goodman though the long tail theory has failed to deliver on the promised democratisation and rewards for all artists.  

So who will pay the piper? “Fans are willing to support artists,” argued Lindvall. “But if they think the artists are being paid and they’re not, then that is a problem”.

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TV or not TV, is that the question?

Tess Alps of Thinkbox recently wrote a great post about TV’s move to online delivery, explaining why it’s not TV versus online because actually, broadcaster content is all the same. This is exactly the kind of message we’ve been sending out and one that it does well to remember. Particularly when measuring your online video campaigns, but I won’t get started on clickthrough versus brand metrics for video ads online here.

It did raise one question for me, admittedly not the biggest issue in the world, but what exactly should we be calling video content delivered via the internet? At the IAB we’re open to suggestions. TV is a familiar name, but a massive proportion of video clips viewed online don’t even originate from “TV”. Our Video Council, to date, opted to go with the digital industry’s naming of on-demand video clips, programmes and adverts. Or just ‘video’ for short. But is this causing a language barrier for traditional TV marketers in making the transition to online?

Why video

To explain why the term ‘video’ makes sense to me, I’ll use a few personal examples. In my house, I have a Mac Mini hooked up to the TV so I can watch the likes of iPlayer and YouTube on the TV already. And that’s the terminology I use, “let’s watch it on YouTube”, “it’s still on iPlayer”, “it’s on 4oD” etc. I don’t say “Let’s watch TV”. However, I’m fully aware that this is just my use of terminology and far from representative of the entire nation.

A few other random thoughts that whirred through my head about terminology:

1. It’s a movie, a programme, a music video
   
2. TV is the television set, not the content being shown on it.
3. When I’m playing computer games on my TV, I’m not watching TV, I’m playing games.
4. When I’m reading the Guardian website, Telegraph website etc. I don’t call it a newspaper, I’m reading their website.
5. When I use Google, I’m not searching, I’m guilty of “Googling it.”
6. When I’m watching YouTube, I’m not watching TV, I’m watching YouTube.
7. When I’m watching 4oD on my laptop, I’m watching 4oD.
8. On the train to my parents in Yorkshire, watching Battlestar Gallactica on my iPhone, I'm watching my iPhone, not TV.
   
9. If all of this content was available through TV screens, eventually people may just say “let’s watch TV” in the living room but I can’t imagine anyone would ever say this about watching YouTube or Hulu on their computers.

1. Consumers may still call it TV.
2. Digital marketers probably know online video best as “video on demand”.
3. TV buyers probably know it best as TV.

So, what is the correct terminology to use for marketers? Is it too early to decide for people? What are your views? Have there been any studies? Is online video getting lost in translation? Does anyone really care or is it just me?

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Reading Fiction is a waste of time

By that I just don’t get any sort of pleasure reading fiction. For me escapism, characterisation, story telling and suspense (the page turner) are delivered in spades through film.  Before you say it, I also have a pathological hate for people who trot out the “well the film wasn’t as good as the book” phrase which is such a shite argument and certainly doesn’t make you appear any better or more informed than the person who has seen the film.  I positively marvel at telling people the film was better than the book – see Marley and Me as case study number 1.
 
I do, however love to read, but non-fiction only (Harry Potter is real btw) and I’m even drawn to factually based books delivered using a light fictional tone – Giles Milton being the god in this department. So I’m with Rory Sutherland 100% who vocally encourages us to read more which is ostensibly a long winded intro to the fact that I’m reading Sway – The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behaviour by Ori and Rom Brafman. 

Bloody brilliant and I won’t spoil it for you, but I did want to raise a point made about Value Attribution that is mentioned in one of the chapters.  Value Attribution is dramatised in the book one January morning in 2007 when Joshua Bell wearing jeans and a baseball cap took to L’Enfant Plaza subway and played a complex arrangement of sonatas using his $3.5 million Stradivarius. Despite Joshua being one of the finest violinists alive and putting on a 43 minute set, he received no round of applause or even a request for an encore.  For Joshua was a victim of Value Attribution, where commuters had inadvertently attributed a value (the cap, the jeans, the venue) they perceived to the quality of the performance.  The same is true of YouTube videos.  Free, low quality, often hand made and therefore the value us marketers attribute to them is that they couldn’t possibly have the same value traits for brands.  Look at Lego Mini Man to see that clearly this is not the case.  

 
As marketers I believe there is a need for us to ignore the value we place on the media and vehicles we use and divert our efforts to the value consumers place on them.  For example, if accessing a brand’s website on a mobile is of value to a consumer then this is more important than our perceived value of how our brand might present itself on a tiny screen.  If a consumer wants to talk about a brand by re-editing its film, but we believe that it may effect the value that film attributes to the brand, is that really an excuse not to let them.
 
I know we’ve quickly come to ‘ask your consumer’ what they want, but maybe we should spend a bit of time watching consumer behaviour to understand the values they assign.  As a small but significant example, the IAB tries to print as much of its findings as possible for marketers to read.  Despite the criticism, we do this because marketers attribute a higher value to something they can hold and manage in their own time rather than something that can be easily trashed on the desktop.  Moving forward I think we need to spend more time understanding consumer value attribution.
 
As an aside if you do want to read more business books, avoid picking advertising ones all the time.  Sway is far from it, and who knows they may make a film of it and I might just have to eat my words.

Scoring a birdie with Twitter

I'm fully aware that not everyone is into golf. But bear with me, this piece is actually about Twitter, and shows how the micro-blogging site can be used to transform even the most boring of brands into something interesting. 

Until this morning I was blissfully unaware of the fact that Hertford's most sartorially challenged sports star, Ian Poulter had a serious Twitter habit. I then read this excellent piece from Donald McRae in today's Guardian in which Poulter explained why he thought Twitter was such a useful tool. 

"If you’re sitting in an office, doing nine to five, this is a great insight into pro golf. Where else are you going to see the inside of a players’ lounge at a major? Lots of people can’t afford to go to major tournaments, so I try and give them a little extra.”

So I checked out Mr Poulter's Twitter feed and sure enough he does offer "a little extra". His feed from this morning for example is filled with pictures of Turnberry's back nine, taken as he paced the course on a practice round.

This got me thinking - why can’t brands use Twitter as effectively as a golfer?

Poulter’s feed shows that personality goes a long way. These are not the tweets of a PR person. This is the work of someone who knows his brand inside out and is not afraid to express himself.

It also shows that you don’t necessarily have to stick to a strict format of text followed by hyperlink. Why not mix up your posts as Poulter does by sharing pictures of your day. By doing so, you can offer a great insight into your brand.

The proof of the effectiveness of Poulter’s tweeting is not just in the numbers, it is also in the fact that his followers clearly love his feed. Comments include "good pictures, good tweets...making it fun"; "thanks so much for taking these pictures. It's the next best thing to being there" and "I think your (sic) taking Twitter to whole new dimension".

Poulter is a long way off the numbers of the top sports star tweeters like Shaquille O’Neil and Lance Armstrong, but he does indeed seem to be taking golf to another dimension with his use of Twitter. At a time when golfers are accused of being faceless automatons this can only be a good thing for the game.

This is something that brands would do well to take note of. With a little bit of imagination, coupled with the application of the necessary resources, Twitter can also be used to transform the image of even the most boring of brands.

At the IAB’s Twitter networking night last week, much of the conversation concerned how brands could utilise micro-blogging to communicate more effectively with their audience. The examples of Dell, Penguin and comparethemarket show that a lot is possible. But there is still much to be done.

In the good old days, lots of business was done on the golf course. Perhaps modern brands would do well to look to the fairways once again for inspiration…

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The internet's wearing new knickers, let’s be grateful

Our friend the internet has been showing us a lot of love this year, but instead of being grateful we’ve been obsessed with Twitter, economics and expenses. Unrequited love is always tragic so let’s take a minute to appreciate what the internet has been doing for us lately.

Last year the IAB anticipated 2009 being the year that the internet industry look under its skirts to improve systems and infrastructure (although I think we used a more appropriate car / under the hood analogy). Little over halfway through the year and this certainly seems to be coming true. Albeit accelerated by the recession and the need to streamline cost efficiencies.

From an internet advertising point of view, we’ve seen improvements across the board from slicker ad operations and behavioural targeting in display, creative teams really getting to grips with new interactivity brought by Flash 10, additional options for search marketing, HD video ads and advances in reporting and measurement.

New innovations are possible, with cloud computing a reality and feeds being used in inventive ways. Publishing has made huge leaps this year too as the major media owners continue to improve their already impressive content. All great news for consumers, particularly as user experience has improved too with social networks and tools bringing customisability coupled with simplicity.

Impressively, all of these improvements and changes – more than I can list in one blog post - seem to be taken for granted after their initial launch. I say impressive, because the seamless transition is testament to the usability of what could be daunting change. The very fact that improved systems so quickly become part of our lives is a compliment to their design.

Humans will always ‘improve things’, but for me 2009 is turning into a landmark year for the internet. Everything feels faster, easier, more connected and it has all happened under the radar of most people. Why this is particularly important is because in 2010 when the global economy is expected to recover from the recent dent, the internet will be a lean, mean, people friendly, business friendly machine.

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