Search results matching tag 'Microsoft'

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

Twitter Search Deal: Social Networking Now Mainstream

2643242 — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 16:24:00 GMT

It’s undoubtedly very exciting that Twitter has struck deals with Microsoft and Google which will see people’s tweets added to their respective search engine results.

In certain respects these are landmark deals – rather than a particular search engine trying to take market share off the other, what we’re seeing is two search engines clearly recognising the importance and influence social networking now has within the search marketing space.

The fact is social networking is now mainstream – that the search giants are now actively adding tweets to their search results underlines that.

This isn’t something that has happened over night, and many industry gurus will be quietly thinking ‘I told you so’ and breathing a sigh of relief after years of trying to convince advertisers to take social networking seriously.

In recent years we’ve seen ideas such as desktop search and search content ads fall by the wayside as search companies try to increase revenues and improve user experience.

This latest Twitter deal will be different as it offers something in search results that is incredibly useful to users - opinions, real stories and snippets of information that will help them to navigate the web better, purchase products/services that are right for them, and warn them off anything that perhaps sounds too good to be true.

The integration of tweets into search results needs to be done properly to avoid diluting the quality of search results. ‘Bing’ especially, has spent a lot of time improving relevance.

But for brands, the development means they'll have an even bigger job on their hands as user opinion spreads even further.

Author: Tim Cook, Group Account Director, CheezeDMG - www.cheezedmg.com, twitter.com/Cheezedmg

Education, education, education (part two)

2175094 — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 11:45:00 GMT

A few weeks ago I wrote about the importance of informing and educating consumers about the internet. This followed a revamp of the IAB’s website – www.youronlinechoices.co.uk – aimed at helping internet users understand online behavioural advertising, how it works and how to switch it off if they want to. Today the IAB, in partnership with business law firm Olswang, has published new research confirming that consumers need (and want) more information and education about online privacy and the practice of behavioural advertising.

The research confirms that consumers today are far more trusting of the internet as a medium, compared with more than five years ago. People – particularly young people – are more comfortable with sharing their personal information with shopping websites, banks and social networking sites. But there’s no room for complacency: consumers may be more acclimatised to the internet and the role it now plays in our everyday lives but they also want to have it on their owns terms and wish to know more about new digital marketing techniques, such as behavioural advertising.

72% of internet users are – unsurprisingly – unaware about behavioural advertising, how it works and what information is collected and used. However, the research results are particularly enlightening when consumers are provided with the relevant information. For example:

• 81% of internet users do not know the level of control they actually have over behavioural advertising, such as their right to switch it off.
• 74% of internet users are actually more comfortable with behavioural advertising when they are provided with information about what data is collected and used and how it can be controlled.

Behavioural advertising remains a relatively new online practice. As the Government’s Digital Britain report acknowledged it is an important business model to help web publishers convert “creativity into value”. Industry needs to find a balance between making advertising more measurable and effective whilst protecting consumer privacy. It’s a balance that the IAB, its members and the rest of the advertising industry is working to get right and education – as this research very clearly shows – needs to be at the heart of it.

Follow the 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.

Bad viral is good viral

2116546 — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 09:48:00 GMT

So there's a new set of groundbreaking Microsoft viral clips/ads out for Windows 7; I say that with sarcasm behind it but I think I'm wrong to slag them off. Here (1, 2, 3) are a few of them

Apple's competitor has become known for pretty dodgy advertising of late (well perhaps it's not just a recent thing) with the laptop hunter ads and ripping off Apple's "I'm a PC" concept - why even mention/reference a company that is by far the number two in operating system market share, come up with your own campaign, but I digress.

We were in awe of the crapness on display with these 'Windows 7 Launch Party' videos, but I think we've been sucked in; damnit. They're meant to be crap, they're meant to make Apple fans go "peh, so not cool" and then pass it around. Why would they care, Microsoft will never be as 'cool' as Apple. All Microsoft want is for people to know Windows 7 is coming out and it's not called Vista.

I think I might have opened a bigger can of worms than I meant to, and there's more to be said about 'crap' work becoming viral - and it being so on purpose.

PowerPoint - 25 years of decline in business communication skills.

1840893 — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 13:58:00 GMT

So PowerPoint is 25 years old. A clinical dissection of its shortcomings was most read item on the BBC News website today.

It quotes Microsoft stats: the average presentation is 250 minutes long, from startup to shutdown, eclipsing the Guinness Book of Records entry for continuous human concentration many times over. The average PowerPoint slide contains 40 words. Snappy.

Our business is as guilty as any of PowerPoint Abuse, especially my own dear research discipline. It is used as a catch-all communication, covering presentation, speaker’s notes, research report and data tables in a brutal assault on the left brain.

And this despite the fact that we work in the heart of the communications business. How long would a planner last if her response to all communications challenges was a poster with a hundred words on it?

Given how easy it is to produce targeted messages in a multitude of media, why don’t we find many 30-second research videos, animated dashboards, podcasts or e-bulletins?

In part because companies invest a lot in generating research, but very little in its activation. Memo to boss: unused research loses you money.

If you haven’t read the article, check it out

What is the fastest growing company in the World?

812253 — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 08:52:00 GMT

Starbucks ? Tata ? "Some Chinese or Indian tech company" - these were the results of the straw poll I conducted in the office this morning,

According to Fortune BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion (RIM) is the World’s fastest-growing company, apparently the Canadian firm recorded average yearly revenue growth of 74% over the last three years,and average profit growth of 84% over the same period. Since 2006, RIM has provided an average 45% return on its backers’ investment.

This growth is directly driven by the huge rise in demand for smartphones in the last three years.- it now has 74% of the business smartphone market and recent reports indicate that the BlackBerry now outsells the iPhone in the US. Interestingly Apple also features at 39 which belies their sucess recently due to the huge base it is growing from.

With smartphone sales representing the fastest-growing segment of the mobile devices market surpassing 40 million units,- a 27 per cent increase from the same period last year they have recently become the "phone of choice" for everyone from high powered International businessmen to sutudents which have apparently adopted them in droves - mainly down to unlimied access to personal email, free contracts and according to some even to cheat in exams ! it will be interesting to see if this growth is sustainable but with the exponential rise in social networking through phones, applications and announcements such as Nokia recently announcing a partneship with Microsoft and Apple relaxing its association with specific carriers such as O2 in the Uk it looks set to continue

I still dream about the simplicity of my old Nokia 6310i !

Internet Explorer 6 - Time to go. Please.

2516287 — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 16:51:00 GMT

When was the last time you used a piece of software for 8 years? Or in fact, any piece of technology for that long? Can you imagine then, supporting this product for the last 8 years, with technology moving on around it? This is what Microsoft have done - and have announced they will continue doing this until 2014. But the underlying question is - why?

As we approach IE6's anniversary in August, we can reflect that was a solid browser at the time, and leaps and bounds better than its previous incarnations. To this degree, I must admit only upgrading myself less than a year ago - and only to version 7. I've been a strong advocate of cross-browser development, and IE6 has always been part of our testing stable. Perhaps it's also the feeling we're getting from some of our clients of being stuck in a comfort zone, which may be part of the resistence in upgrading.

From an IT point of view, I can understand Microsoft's motive for doing this. I'm sure there are still installations of Windows for Workgroups still kicking around in a basement somewhere - another product from Redmond that enjoyed a 15 year life cycle. However these types of things are much less likely to influence the progress of technology outside.

I've heard the classic "Well, it's different in a business/corporate/[insert IT jargon here] environment" excuse, but how is this relevant for browsers? As web browsers are such an outward facing platform, the web development world has to bow to the whims of many browsers. And there are many whims in IE6. So with Microsoft continuing to support IE6 users, progress in web technology slows down. By discontinuing support we can put the final nail in the coffin and move on.

So where's the marketing angle to this?

By hanging on to IE6, we are held back with web and online design as well as the roll-out of other really cool rich media and interactivity. HTML 5 which is already supported by many of the latest browsers promises many cool new features: Embedded video and audio, drag-and drop, off-line web applications, logical content blocks (opening up new potential in search-engine friendliness) - all out of the box without facny plugins. And don't forget CSS 2+ (did someone say "Alpha transparency"?).

As great as IE6 was, designers and developers are now finding themselves increasingly being held back with what they can do because of this now well-and-truly legacy product. And now they're taking a stand. Even Microsoft are saying "Friends do not let friends use IE6". So I'm saying this to you now. Please. Upgrade.

I am a PC and 4 and a half

2085942 — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 08:16:00 GMT

I am loving the evolution of the I am a PC campaign. Its warm, personal and positions Microsoft as a champion of humanity rather than a cold, distant high functional technology brand which mainly appeals to men. Women use technology as a means to creativity and to provide meaningful human interaction in their life. http://www.youtube.com/v/DtilWL4mnhI

One of the ads features a 4 and a half year old Kylie (too cute for words) who uses Windows Live Photo Gallery to send a picture of her fish to her parents.

The strategy is simple: technology so simple that a 4 and a half year old could do it. Another features a small boy has a large construction ranged all around the kitchen, and demonstrates taking lots of pictures of different parts of it, transferring those from the camera to a laptop, and then stitching them all together to make one. Its a thankful departure from Microsoft's unsuccessful retort to the Apple ads which was the wrong strategy for a myriad of reasons I have discussed before. This is about what Microsoft stands for and gives them a narrative that goes beyond their product.

Its not about the piece of kit. Its about how you use technology to enhance your home. Its not about the spec. Its about what that spec enables you to do. Its not about the photo. But the memory and signal you are sending to those who you send it to. It starts to take Microsoft from being part of 'my office life' to being at the 'centre of my home. '

Not a bad place to start.

What is Publicis getting for the $530 million value placed on Razorfish

1699071 — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 21:36:00 GMT

If, as Publicis Groupe has announced, it is paying $530 million to acquire digital agency Razorfish from Microsoft, it begs the question: why pay that much? Surely the digital sector has not escaped the economic downturn and wasn't Razorfish a strategic anomaly that Microsoft was eager to shed?

Admittedly Razorfish is a different business from what it was in 2003 when the consultancy SBI & Company paid $63.2 million to buy it back from the dotcom dumping ground called Seneca Investments that was created to enable Omnicom to offload its stakes in loss-making digital businesses. For one thing Razorfish was subsequently amalgamated with a number of other weak digital agencies like Scient and Lante, and for that enlarged package aQuantive paid $160 million eighteen months later.

Another five years have passed since then, and Publicis is paying 3.5 times the aQuantive price to acquire the business. Razorfish may be much bigger today, presumably incorporating much of aQuantive's former avenueA business too. Razorfish may be more profitable today (hardly difficult when compared with the losses of $334 million it had accumulated by 2001). But so far we have been kept in the dark about the scale of business that Publicis is getting for its $530 million.

All we do know is that the whole of aQuantive's digital marketing services division made a profit before tax and interest income of $50 million in 2007. If that entire division is in the sale package and if it hasn't been hit by the economic downturn (two big "ifs"), Publicis is paying not much more than 10 times the 2007 profit before tax and interest. That compares very favourably with the more heady multiple it paid for Digitas and the even more heady multiple that Microsoft paid for the whole of aQuantive.

So information about the current financial performance of the business being bought is of crucial importance. It's not enough simply to point out that Morgan Stanley had been hoping to get $700 million from the sale (see Razorfish sale foreseen in 2007).

Publicis will rightly make great play of the added clout the acquisition will give to its already sizeable penetration of the digital market. Razorfish brings serious digital marketing expertise to enhance that of Modem Media and complement the technology expertise that resides at Digitas. So strategically it could put Publicis in a very strong position - enough to frighten its global competitors. And the strategic alliance agreement it has signed with Microsoft seems likely to add some further, so far unquantified, benefits. But is that enhanced market position worth $530 million?

And there is another unknown in this equation: how will Publicis apply this expanded digital expertise in meeting the marketing needs of clients? Creating the whizzy brand name Vivaki for all its digital assets is not enough. How will these assets inter-relate with traditional marketing agencies? Is there a place for digital businesses to take the lead in marketing? Or will the traditional marketing agencies retain their influence by absorbing digital technology as just another part of their communication armoury? How will agencies like Saatchi & Saatchi, Publicis and Fallon relate to Vivaki? More important, how will clients relate?

Publicis will be spending cash of about $300 million to acquire Razorfish, in addition to about $230 million in shares. The cash outlay will push up the group's net debt to around $1.3 billion. Even so its debt/equity ratio in the region of 1:3 would still be considered fairly prudent. Maintaining that ratio will depend on whether Publicis can preserve its past acquisitions at their current book values and avoid any goodwill impairment charges. With goodwill valued at well over $5 billion it would not take too many more economic tremors to undermine it - and with it the group's debt/equity ratio.