Search results matching tag 'Internet'

Education, education, education (part three...and final)

2175094 — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:40:00 GMT

I’ve banged the drum in previous weeks about the importance of consumer education about behavioural advertising, and the IAB's recent research has highlighted the need for this.

Today the IAB has published a guide on behavioural advertising specifically for industry, our first step in helping educate the market about this practice (although you’ll be glad to know that this will be my last blog – for now - talking about education). The guide explains how behavioural advertising works, how it differs to other types of targeted advertising on the internet, its benefits to web publishers and advertisers, consumer attitudes as well as online privacy and industry good practice.

The guide – sponsored by technology company Audience Science – hasn’t been written exclusively by the IAB but by the experts themselves, with contributions from the likes of AOL, Guardian, Profero, Post Office, Yahoo!, ValueClick Media and, of course, Audience Science.

It may not make the Amazon bestsellers list (its free after all) but for anyone who wants to know a little more about behavioural advertising, this one’s for you. Enjoy!

Follow IAB on Twitter

Education, education, education (part one)

2175094 — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 11:01:00 GMT

It's official: us Brits love shopping online. According to research by price comparison service, Uswitch, 93% of the UK population now shop on the internet (I think that’s 93% of the 2,500 adults they surveyed!). And, as consumers continue to ‘connect’ so advertisers increasingly look to the internet as a platform to get their messages across and sell their wares. The two are mutually beneficial. Some of us just can’t get enough of all this (it’s empowering and addictive). For others the tide of change is uncomfortable and some need help getting connected in the first place (and there’s no one better than digital entrepreneur and Government Digital Inclusion Champion, Martha Lane Fox, to make this happen).

So, it’s important to inform and educate people about the internet. This is not a new message: government, Ofcom and others, including industry, have spearheaded campaigns to help people – particularly parents and children - better understand online and its significant benefits but also the challenges it throws up in our everyday lives. Understanding how to keep safe and secure is lesson number one and many schools build this into their curricula activities as they integrate the use of the internet into children’s learning.

This week the IAB has revamped its consumer website dedicated to explaining behavioural advertising: www.youronlinechoices.co.uk. We launched this site when we published our Good Practice Principles earlier this year to govern the practice. One of the three key commitments is education and many of the businesses involved continually go to great lengths to provide consumers with helpful information. Our website builds on these: providing easy-to-understand information on behavioural advertising, how it works and the role it plays in helping make online content, services and applications available at little or no cost. This is backed up by the other commitments: transparency about what information is collected and used to deliver more relevant advertising as well as the opportunity to opt out or switch it off. So the new website includes a centralised page for consumers to visit to opt out of behavioural advertising by the businesses that are complying with the IAB’s Good Practice Principles. Our future aim is to make this even more user friendly.

The launch of the website marks the point that those businesses that have signed up to the Good Practice Principles and have live commercial UK operations are complying with the commitments. To complement this, each of these businesses’ compliance will be independently verified by auditor ABCe to provide greater assurance in this practice. This is key but its only by explaining clearly what this is all about and how it all works that we can really expect consumers – heavy or light internet users – to accept and understand why we’re taking this approach.

Follow the IAB on Twitter.

Is Purefold pure gold for brands or pure confusion?

2292853 — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 13:14:00 GMT

Coming soon from Free Scott, the new entertainment venture of Ridley Scott and his brother Tony, is a trippy new sci-fi entertainment project called Purefold that plans to let brand’s sponsor the content, and let the audience drive the plot line using social networking platforms.

Produced by Ag8, the concept will see participating brands “…take an alternative route to brand integration than traditional product placement and embrace invention within a narrative framework.” The project explores transmedia entertainment and will launch off of cross-platform channels. What? Purefold just might represent pure gold for brands looking to reach audiences in an extremely interactive format, but as of now, it has a lot of people baffled as to how it will work, what it will be, and if branded content is a good idea or not.

Discussions about Purefold on Friend Feed, the main resource planned to “harvest” story ideas, are already brewing about the question of what it means to be human, the driving theme behind the story that will be loosely based on Blade Runner. Ag8 is getting people to explore the idea of what “transhumanism” is in the Purefold discussion group on Friend Feed, but the project is often met with confusion, with participants trying to understand what is happening, and what role they will play. For insight as to what people think of Purefold, I’ve been asking around.

A few entertainment insiders were willing to go on the record to share what they think of the project and here is what they had to say: Jenifer Hanen, a blogger from Los Angeles, was wary of the idea of brand’s sponsoring content based on projects she has seen fail, but likes the DIY media side of the project and the idea to have the plot line driven by the audience. Listen to a conversation I had with Jen about Purefold here.

Film Production Designer Tema L. Staig, who is based in Los Angeles, first reacted to the idea of Purefold saying “The project sounds almost like virtual mad libs for content and advertising.” She also had this to say: "Universally, people have always needed to create visual and/or verbal stories and have a cathartic experience through those stories, either through the telling or the viewing. This is what makes us human. This is what connects us across the globe. Historically, unrelated cultures share similar myths and stories, suggesting that we all have a desire to explain the natural, unnatural, and supernatural. It’s our most primal of needs.

It will be interesting to see how Ag8 takes story telling to humanity’s next level. The idea of us, the greater audience being involved directly in the story is compelling in that it creates (in theory) even more empathy for the characters – those characters are a part of us. It’s our baby, even if just a little bit. How will it effect society? Will it bring us together around a global campfire? What new brainstorms might it spark? The possibilities are endless."

Here in London, I asked Mervyn Lyn, who is Vice President of Strategic Partnerships for Sony Music and often gets involved with branded content for the entertainment company, what he thinks of Purefold. At first reaction, he said it reminds him of MTV’s Dubplate Drama that turned to the audience to drive the story line, a show he enjoyed because it made the viewers feel part of the show. As for letting brand’s sponsor the content, he was cautionary about the idea because so often people are suspicious when a company attempts to sell them something through a new medium. “It depends how it is done and if it is trying to lean on branded content then they will have to strike a balance between the brand and the content so that each side doesn’t feel they are losing out,” he said.

They need to be very careful in making it driven by advertising because people see this as being railroaded and people will be cynically asking ‘what are they trying to sell me?’” The approach Purefold is using will be ground breaking in entertainment, according to producers, and it will be distributed according to the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license, giving both audiences, brands and platforms equal use rights through their participation.

According to Ag8’s Tom Himpe, Purefold will be broadcast across a variety of media platforms and spread virally across the Internet. “Most brands are aware of the fact that social media has changed the dynamics of the conversation, and they can't just spell out their message in the same way as with one-way advertising methods,” he said. “We are giving brands the opportunity to create stories over an extended period of time, in collaboration with their audiences and relying on top industry talent in both writing and directing. That's quite a unique package, especially in view of the fact that they can use the audiovisual assets freely across all their platforms and channels, from retail to mobile, from cinema to television.”

For now Ag8 is not revealing who the brand sponsors will be, but based on Friend Feed discussions the writers are already compiling what the story line will be, all set in the near future. The question many have is how brands will fit into the discussion, and for that, Himpe had this to say:

“There are two ways in which we are "guiding" the conversation. First of all, the brand is setting up the framework of the conversation, by defining one or multiple brand propositions they want to explore and picking a story line through which they want to explore that proposition. This sets up the framework within which we harvest online conversations.

So we're not just harvesting random conversations across the entire web, we set out specific parameters with the participating brands. Secondly, while we're listening to what the audience wants to see within the episodes, the ultimate creative control still resides with our editorial team and the Free Scott Directors, who are making creative sense of the audience's input. So there is another level of control there. However, it's very important for brands to understand that Purefold is about creating top quality entertainment, and not about extended the length of their tv commercials.

There's a different balance here, and sure, that's something they might have to get used to.”

Still confused, but ready to watch Purefold unfold,

-Lisa

Real change or empty rhetoric?

2175094 — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 11:35:00 GMT

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.

Follow the IAB on Twitter.

Eight things wrong with the internet

1919324 — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 09:09:00 GMT

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…

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.
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”.
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.
Universal ID / logins – is taking too long to become a reality.
Badly designed websites – are still abundant and it makes the majority of websites impenetrable to the majority of users.

Age ratings – or lack of.
ViAgRa Spam – it’s still an issue, but actually less so as more people use social networks like Facebook to handle personal messaging.
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.

The solutions? I don’t have all of the answers, but here’s a starter for ten:

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.
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.
The Government should make it illegal for a company to exist purely to buy new domains and resell them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I guess this is where the IAB comes in… time to round up the troops?

These are only my thoughts, and it may be that some of these issues are already being worked on – so please enlighten me if they are!

Collaborative Individualism Emerges At Reboot Britain

2292853 — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 08:32:00 GMT

This week's NESTA sponsored Reboot Britain conference brought together a mix of government, business, banks, technology, media people from the UK, and visitors from the USA that saw left leaning Labour/Liberal Democrat political views engage and collaborate with conservative Tory representatives. The crowd's reaction saw the many of those who are normally distrustful of government, financial institutions and conservative politics try to mingle more with what they historically view as the "other side" of the spectrum.

Opening remarks from conservative Jeremy Hunt MP, Shadow Secretary of State for Culture Media and Sport, had him lovingly embrace the Internet, new technology and the governments increasing integration of it into public services. He praised the transformative nature of new technology's impact in delivering high quality factual content to the world from ordinary citizens, with Wikipedia, and talked about a new effort to publish and provide archives of government documents online for access to all. Hunt said that politics has been stuck in a rut toward progress, with its stance to first fight online, then ignore it, and only now begin to embrace it. People have flipped politics on its head by rushing online to express views and grassroots organizse around issues in powerful ways that have not beeen witnessed before, making for the emergence of a new movement composed of "collaborative individualism."

"Huge change is possible with the Internet and the Internet also makes possible some very unpleasant things," he said. "The Internet is a powerful way to connect voters and as a politician I have to engage more intelligently with my constituents."

Hunt's speech received mixed reaction and a bix of cheeky tweet banter from a crowd of professionals who live on the bleeding edge of the technological world, think liberally and radically, and often wonder why the conservatives, and the government, with its recent release of the Digital Britain report, have taken so long to embrace new technology that the left and leaders like Al Gore have been pushing the agenda toward for years. Now, it seems, the people have collectively forced politics to adapt or be left behind.

Visiting Reboot Britain was a digital celebrity group of Americans called the Travelling Geeks, who mingled with the guests and presented panel sessions throughout the day, including Craig Newmark, the nerd who many people feel changed the world with Craigslist.org.

"The Internet makes public service people feel they can come out of the darkness, and feel liberated and my hidden agenda is helping people in government affect change, and talk, and accelerate collaboration across the Atlantic," he said. On the good side, most people want to be a positive influence, and on the evil side, noisy, idiotic spammers and trolls with extremist views pollute the channels of communication and need moderation to combat this ugly side.

To combat the ugly side of the Internet, people need a friendly "nudge" to do good, and regulations toward social media use among public service employees needs to be relaxed so that they can feel safe freely expressing views and using the tools to improve things, citing the example of Newmark's favourite project FixMyStreet.

I caught up with Newmark after his talk, and you can listen to his commentary here on this Audioboo.

Pock marking the day was an insulting and demeaning panel presentation asking "Is the Web Female?" that attracted a majority of female attendants, only to sucker-punch them with horrible commentary from two of the American panelists who behaved like the scary, exclusionary popular girls in a Beverly Hills 90210 high school class. While lifestreamer Megan Asha and technology journalist Sarah Lacy may be respected digital influencers in US circles they did themselves, nor the women in the audience, any favours by describing how women behave online as being "catty, gossipy" and wanting to shop a lot. The comments provoked anger among the audience:

"Disappointed is the web female session seemingly stymied by pointless focus on imaginary gender characteristics. A waste." tweeted @josiefraser

"A few minutes of listening to 'is the web female' debate and you lose the will to live." tweeted @hollandshurst.

"Finally giving up on 'Is the Web Female', which is relying on a narrow, depressing & slightly weird definition of "female" tweeted @justinpickard

Panelist Joanne Jacobs balanced out the nasty catty female debate by smashing stereotype demographics and openly confessing that she often gender-switches online to allow herself more freedom with masculine-style expression. MT Rainey brought home the concept that the web is neither male or female but simply a place where humanity gathers.

The day's closing address saw Howard Reingold outline ways to improve digital inclusion with digital literacy, and more activism.

"Boring blogs and Twitter accounts show that participating just isn't good enough, being an active citizen is a start but from passive consumption you have to move toward participation," he said. Reingold called for the end of crap content, miss-information, spam, porn spam and helping more people develop their own "crap detectors."

Master of ceremonies for the day was Policy Unplugged's Steve Moore who remarked at closing that he was thrilled to watch #rebootbritain trending above the dominant topic King of Pop Michael Jackson's death on Twitter.

Feeling gossipy, catty and like shopping so guess I should get online and surf the Web today,

-Lisa

The 'Jigsaw Effect’

2545594 — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 09:46:00 GMT

‘Hi! I’m TopKat and I just came third in the county’s under-14 cross-country.’

Looks innocuous enough, doesn’t it? Couldn’t possibly be dangerous for the child that posted it, could it? The sad truth, though, is that there is probably enough information in this one sentence for the wrong kind of person to identify the child that made the posting.All of us are sensitive of our duty of care to children and young adults.

Those of us running web sites, social networks, blogs and the like probably take what we think are sensible steps to ensure children are ‘safe’. No real names to be used! No addresses! No emails! We probably screen for ‘purple words’, we may also have the content of bulletin boards and chat-rooms moderated, just to be sure.The unfortunate fact though, is that however careful we are, however thorough, the very tools we so value on the internet can make it a potentially dangerous place.

Think about it from your own perspective. You know you shouldn’t, but how often do you use the same password? More important from the point of view of identifying you, how often do you use the same ID, even if it is a nickname?The reality is whilst most of us use the same password over and over, we have some protection because web sites take extraordinary steps to safeguard them, but we happily post our nicknames over blogs, bulletin boards and social networks.

Punch it in to Google and there is a good chance someone can find your unwitting web footprint. With a little detective work you’d be surprised how much those disparate and unrelated postings could tell someone about you.Same problem for TopKat! She, or he, probably uses that nickname on a number of their favourite web sites. And sports results are regularly posted to the web. Start sleuthing and you’d be amazed at what you can dig up.

The risk for children and young adults (and the rest of us) is the ‘jigsaw’ effect of data posted across the internet. So what to do? Regulation, both self-regulation and the statutory sort, clearly has a role, but short of shutting down the internet it is unlikely the risks can be eliminated. What we need to work towards is a situation where risks are reduced, and most important children and young adults are educated as to how to minimise the dangers to themselves.

The recent Byron Review makes a balanced assessment of the risks and the benefits for children of the internet, and sets-out some excellent recommendations. Taking as an analogy how we teach children to cross the road, Byron advocates educating children and young adults as to the potential risks of the web, with a view to achieving the following outcomes; an ability to manage (or find support in managing) the risks; and an ability to take ownership of their own online safety.

That said, Byron is quite clear that there is a responsibility on site owners and content providers to reduce the risks to children, and to encourage and promote safe behavior. So now may be the time to review how ‘safe’ your web site is. To ask the question ‘what more could I do?’, and to see what else you could be doing to help young children appreciate and manage the risks, but still enjoy, explore and grow with the internet.

Mark Wooding is MD of Soprano an agency that provides strategic consultancy, creative execution and build and implementation for all aspects of digital media. Mark is one of the UK’s web pioneers having established one of the first Internet Agencies – Nexus Multimedia. Mark has run BBDO’s Traffic agency, and helped found Proximity London and establish Proximity in the Middle East. He also ran Electronic Solutions and has consulted widely on user experience and e-marketing issues.

The rainforest and the advertising industry

2460092 — Wed, 27 May 2009 10:13:00 GMT

I’ve had a week to digest the talking points of our Zeitgeist conference, where royals, bankers, business leaders, journalists and even an Amazonian tribal chief came together to discuss issues of the day. But one issue in particular stuck in my mind – sustainability. Sustainability was certainly the key theme as the Prince of Wales made a moving and humbling speech about the environment and technology, pleading that the Amazon be “treated like a human being.” But there were also lively debates about the future of the media industry, and indeed, the sustainability of the business models of traditional media. It was a chance for us all to think about the roles we play within the industry, how content producers manage and make money from content and how we sustain quality and valuable advertising output. It was also another chance for Google to understand the concerns of newspaper and TV owners, and ensure their thoughts are top of mind for us in helping them make money from their content on the web. From talking to agency leaders at the event, it’s clear media agencies will be fighting tooth and nail over any big accounts that come up for grabs over the coming weeks and months. The industry must be careful that the stiff competition doesn’t become a cut-throat exercise in cutting costs, inevitably leading to a downfall in the quality of advertising. Indeed quality and value for money is something all agencies and media owners need to ensure is sustainable when trying to encourage advertisers to invest in marketing in the downturn.

Wifi hits the dashboard....

2521313 — Tue, 19 May 2009 12:06:05 GMT

From American online news supplier Inside Radio

"Radio’s reign as king of in-car listening may not be over, but there’s a new threat on the horizon. Autonet Mobile has begun selling Wi-Fi for the car at more than 3,300 stores nationwide, including Best Buy."

We have also heard on the grapevine that Apple are introducing an application for their I-Phone product which will allow people to listen to online radio direct via their car stereos from July of this year.

The growth of online listening continues.

Ross Hemsworth
Glastonbury Radio

…And access for all

2460092 — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 15:00:00 GMT

As you may have read in a previous post, our house is currently a building site and we’re living in temporary accommodation. Although the flat is nice enough, the family and I are all starting to miss our creature comforts: my wife and I the garden and the Sky Plus HD box, the kids their trampoline. But we’re united in yearning for broadband which we’re all struggling to cope without.

My youngest daughter is a fan of the Bratz website (about dolls and accessories, for those of you without young girls), my son his Xbox live gaming & my eldest a constant stream of YouTube - let alone all their homework requirements which seem to demand internet access these days.

As well as for work, broadband access is vital for my late night binges on iTunes & paying the builders. We’ve experimented with 3G cards, but can’t seem to get a good enough reception out in the sticks, so the whole experience becomes frustrating.

We know that around 90 per cent of people who’ve just moved home would chose broadband over a microwave if they could only have one installed in the first month. How consumer behaviour has changed in the last few years. And I hope there are no doctors reading, but I read that 40 per cent of us would rather give up fresh fruit and veg than our broadband connection!

Whatever the industry’s thoughts on Digital Britain, we can applaud the decision to give as many people as possible access to broadband. Not only will it feed my families’ needs & obsessions but it’s great news for the UK’s agencies and advertisers as it expands the vibrant marketplace that the internet creates, as well as delivering consumers all the public service information they need.