Virals - Reach for the stars

"We don’t think The Beatles will do anything in this market…"

Capitol Records internal memo, 1963.


What makes a film 'go viral'?

A client asked me this the other day. I thought I would share the gist of what I told her…

Firstly I said: "I don’t know" which I thought was impressively honest of me. (Didn’t all those years working in agencies teach me anything?). I quickly went on to suggest that nobody else knows either. Indeed no-one, but no-one, can guarantee success in viral marketing. That’s part of the fun. You can pretty much guarantee failure if you don’t do the basics (see below). If you do everything right, you are likely to get a good number of views on YouTube and/or Metacafé (not to mention Google Video, Break and Dailymotion). But as to whether your film will 'take off' or 'go stratospheric', well that’s largely in the lap of the gods. Viral marketing is so named, because if you get it right, people forward your video to others in an ever-increasing circle via the wonder of the internet and it spreads like a virus (but in a good way) so that the number of views rises exponentially to a massive number approaching infinity (or something.) Of course just because it's easy to forward the link to your mates doesn't mean people are going to do so. Therein lies both the challenge and the unpredictability of this whole business.

In the same way that a music act or a movie can ‘capture the Zeitgeist’ and take off (in some cases against all the odds), so can a short promotional film (or a game). So read what follows, cross your fingers and hope you’re sitting on the next Beatles,
Slumdog Millionaire or Susan Boyle!

It’s worth clarifying that we’re not talking ‘You’ve Been Framed’ or roller-skating dogs here; except where they are used to promote a brand (e.g. Cadbury’s gorilla) i.e. we are talking about viral marketing. We need to get the brand name/ logo in somewhere. The media isn’t paid for, (it’s 'earned' as the PR people like to say) but in general the creative, production and seeding is.

A few basic principles:

1. Content is king (sorry to resort to cliché)

You must give people a reason to forward your film (which after all reflects on them for thinking the recipient would be interested in it) , so your film needs to be:

• Funny

• Interesting

• Violent

• Risqué

Or some combination of the above!

Of course you may upset some people with violent/ sexy content: be aware what you are doing and the risks attached (certain grannies will probably hate you and certain video sharing sites will probably ban you).

2. Get the length right: as a rough rule of thumb: more than 30 sec; less than 4 minutes

3. Experiment with executions; indeed consider a series with similar creative; awareness can build until you suddenly hit the jackpot

4. Don’t try too hard to sell: you can include your logo and brand name subtly; if the film is considered cool, the kudos will rub off on you

(By the way, branded viral games have their own set of rules; that could be a whole other blog post.)

There’s a another crucial ingredient of a successful viral campaign - seeding. In short, this means putting your film where it will be seen by people who will pass it on; they are the digerati, the movers and shakers (OK basically, cool people like us). It’s giving your viral film ‘critical mass’.

As with many branches of digital marketing, a whole mystique has grown up around ‘seeding strategy'. Specialist seeding agencies have sprung up, promising ‘to put your film where it will get the best possible start in life, at the heart of your target audience’. Needless to say these companies are rather tight-lipped about exactly how they will do this (well none of us likes to give away our intellectual property, after all!). To be serious, there is no doubt that very few films can go truly viral without at least a little judicious seeding but, as usual, there are no cast-iron guarantees.

Here are three virals that made it big- very big. Sure, all do the basics right but, beyond this, all of them just 'took off'; maybe yours will too!


• Will it blend? iPhone

• Transport for London Awareness test

• Honda Cogs

For this last, by Wieden + Kennedy (London), credit to: executive creative directors Tony Davidson and Kim Papworth, art director Matt Gooden, copywriter Ben Walker and agency producer Rob Steiner. OK it was shot (live) as a TV commercial, but it’s so good it works brilliantly as a viral film. Which all goes to prove that those old ‘traditional media’ skills are far from obsolete; increasingly we’re just going to be seeing the fruits of such creativity and production expertise in new and surprising places. Which is nice.

So go on; send your viral film out there into the big wide world. Reach for the stars. Good luck!

SEO: "seek, and ye shall find." (Luke 11)

Anyone remember WebCrawler? Infoseek? HotBot? AltaVista? Lycos? As long as we’ve had search engines, we’ve had SEO (= search engine optimisation). And as Microsoft announces a UK roadshow to launch its new search platform, Bing, as a serious rival to Google, SEO is firmly established as part of the digital marketing landscape.

Indeed SEO or 'natural search' is a whole separate industry these days. It can be defined as: helping site owners to optimise their ranking in Google and other search engines when users search by certain relevant “keywords”.

The evolving role of the practice of SEO is currently a hot topic in digital marketing circles. Some are even suggesting its days are numbered as the search engines (especially Google) get wise to sharp practices to manipulate rankings.

To clarify: we are not talking here about paid search (= pay per click) e.g. Google AdWords, where one ‘buys’ keywords (via a bidding process) and Google displays one’s clickable text-only ad as a sponsored link in the Google Results page. (see the results at the top and right hand side of the Google Results Page.) The 'opposite' of paid search is organic or natural search which is the subject of this post.

Why does SEO matter? Look at the facts: 90% of all web sessions start with a search engine (Google, Yahoo!, Live Search, Ask Jeeves etc.) This figure has been increasing year on year as more and more people give up on bookmarking sites (far less actually remembering urls!) and rely on Google to find the site for them. So if you have a website, and someone 'Googles' the thing you sell, you want to appear (or be ‘ranked’) near the top of the listings and certainly on the first page. If you are not, people may never find your site and you won’t be very successful. In fact you risk being invisible, lonely and broke (to misquote Cory Doctorow). Received wisdom is that 62% of searchers click on a result within the first page of results, and approx 28% of all searchers click on results within page 2 or 3. Readers of a mathematical bent will notice that this leaves only 10% i.e. hardly anyone looks beyond page 3. (This raises the question: how many pages of search results do users really require? - which could be the topic of another blog post or indeed a session at an SEO conference!)

One more fact: Google handles between 75% and 86% (UK: Hitwise April 2009) of all search traffic depending on which country you look at; so for the purposes of this post when we say “Google” we mean “Search Engine”. Unhealthy? Maybe, but realistic currently.

Suppose I have a website which sells Golf equipment. Keywords of interest to me might be: Golf equipment, Golf gear, Golf accessories, Golf clubs, Golf bags, Golf clothes, Golf apparel etc etc.

I might wish to consider optimising my site for any or all of these “keywords” (which are often than not more than one actual word). One can achieve high rankings more easily for niche keywords: If you search Google for “Golf Equipment” you will get about 37,700,000 results. (in 0.25 seconds!) At 10 results per page that gives us approx 3,770,000 pages of results. If however one lives in the West Midlands of England and is looking for a professional to stuff your dead cat, and you search by “Taxidermists in Wolverhampton” one gets only 16,900 results but this is still 1,690 pages. Only a few sites make it onto page 1 and many excellent sites languish invisibly on page 500+.

So SEO is, these days, a major digital marketing discipline; but is it legitimate? i.e. both ethical and good business?

Let’s just have a look at the agendas of the various parties involved:

• Google: wants its search engine to be good at its job; i.e. it wants as many users as possible to have the best possible experience; i.e. to find a selection of suitable sites as quickly and as painlessly as possible. It particularly wants to direct users to site/s with well written and presented content that best deliver what they were looking for; in pursuit of this it tries to interpret their intention (which is not always exactly what they type in to the Google search box). If it succeeds, it will attract more traffic and make more money out of AdWords (its pay- per-click product).

• The Site owner: wants high ranking in search results whenever a user types in a keyword which it deems relevant to its business; i.e. they want to maximize quality and quantity of traffic to their site.

• The SEO consultancy/ professional: wants to do a good job for the Site owner i.e. get the site up the Google rankings, driving more traffic, pleasing the client and thus getting more optimization briefs and making more money.

Good site design and legitimate SEO helps everyone: users who search by a given keyword find a relevant site which delivers what they were looking for and provides a good experience. The SEO professional and the design/build agency should work together to make the site visible to search engines which pleases them since they are helping their customers (=searchers). The Google spiders (or crawlers) look at millions of web pages and assess their relevance to a particular search (yes, it’s amazing I know). It’s absolutely OK to help them by a little judicious signposting (like putting up a sign in the street outside your shop; effectively the site is ‘putting its best foot forward’) . Also, if you can get plenty of inbound links (i.e. other sites publishing links to your site) Google likes this: it suggests your site must be of high quality. It’s OK to solicit these links (e.g. if you are a florist, you might ask local chocolate shops if they want to link to your site). So far so good.

The problems occur when SEO practitioners and/ or site owner Webmasters attempt to deceive the search engine spiders (and therefore ultimately the user) by employing a range of techniques to manipulate the Google rankings (including any or all of: spamdexing, cloaking, doorway pages, keyword stuffing, invisible text, deals with link farms +++).

Ever since Search was invented, unscrupulous SEO experts (known as ‘black hat’ operators) have been trying to manipulate it, i.e. to get people to visit sites under false pretences, taking them to sites which were not what they were looking for; the result being an unfair advantage to the site owner and/or confused/ dissatisfied visitors, a scenario which benefits no-one except the black hat guys! If they succeed, they achieve an inappropriately high Google ranking and ultimately can even take the user to a site that wasn’t what they were looking for. Of course it isn’t always as cut and dried as this: in many cases, the user would be equally satisfied by any one of a number of search results, and techniques may be used which give a good site a ‘helping hand’ in the listings. There are grey areas: like how many times can one legitimately include a given keyword in one’s content: 3 times in a page makes the site relevant, three times in a sentence looks sinister and may lead to Google penalizing or even delisting your site.

Of course, there is one obvious question which we haven’t addressed here (space doesn’t allow): who decides which SEO techniques are OK and which are ‘black hat’? which can get your site demoted in the listings or even banned? Of course currently it’s Google who decides. 'Baddies' clearly operate in this space so some sanctions are necessary; but should a single company (even our buddies at Google) be given so much power?

Effectively the black hat SEO specialists are engaged in an ever-shifting battle of wits with the search engines and the (secret) Google algorithm is certainly much more sophisticated at picking up dubious SEO techniques than it was 10 years ago. eg. stuffing in loads of invisible keywords used to be much more prevalent (and effective!). Even legitimate SEO has evolved with the Search Engines. Metatags (invisible to users but viewed by the spiders) used to be very important; less so today. Indeed, if you read a book on SEO dated before 2004 (say) I respectfully suggest you may be wasting your time!

As part of an ongoing mission to fight spam and improve user experience, Google is apparently implementing a series of changes to the algorithm (it doesn't announce these). In the future, as Google moves towards behaviour/ intent based search, it is possible that each person who conducts a search for a particular term will get different results based on their interests, search history and even their location. As a result, SEO will need to evolve. One possibility is that link building will become far less important in the future of SEO because Google will determine the ‘value’ (= relevance) of a website based on how visitors engage with it. This would imply that the ultimate goal of site owners should be to provide compelling content that entices visitors to read, share, bookmark, and so on.

Another possibility is that search engines will in future provide user-controlled rankings. Users might have the chance to vote for sites they like and sites will get ranked based on such votes. (The model would be similar to Digg and Reddit). Of course, search engines will need to ensure that votes are genuine in order to prevent black hat SEO specialists from manipulating the results.

Google and the other search engines are raising the bar in SEO. Initially, this will make it harder for SEO professionals but the end result must be good. Spammers and 'black hat's will have more difficulty succeeding in their unscrupulous efforts and search engine users will be provided with content that is more relevant.

As always, the aim of webmasters and SEO professionals should be to appeal to humans not machines. Your site should certainly be optimized (to give you a fighting chance in the competitive marketplace) but your priority should always be to meet human needs and provide solutions. Considering the direction that SEO is going, human actions and behaviour will ultimately determine rankings. Your SEO success will depend on your ability to engage people through great content and shrewd social media marketing. This is as it should be.

The internet has transformed our lives: at work, at home and increasingly on the move. The Web is becoming richer and more complex every day. To cope with the mind boggling amount of data it offers, we need increasingly sophisticated tools to make sense of it: to 'organise the world’s information'. Unscrupulous operators will always try to manipulate the search engine spiders (or crawlers) to gain a higher ranking but they must be prevented from doing this; it’s in the public interest, as well as that of Google, Yahoo!, Ask Jeeves, Live Search/ Bing and not least genuine SEO professionals, that the user can find the 'right' site as rapidly as possible every time.

If one believes that Advertising (assisted by agents as 'paid advocates') i.e. promoting the benefits of a product or service to the target audience by all appropriate media, is a legitimate activity in a free society, then it follows that SEO is OK and indeed desirable: it helps honest merchants reach their willing audiences. Indeed, Google doesn’t want to kill SEO; and even if it ceases to be such a dominant player in the search world, other search engines are likely to want to work with ‘honest’ SEO professionals rather than against them.

So current rumours of the imminent death of SEO are much exaggerated. As long as search engines publish free lists of ‘relevant’ sites, SEO will exist. Naturally (sorry) like everything in the digital world, SEO will need to evolve and adapt. It will do so. Intent and behaviour-based search will grow. Social search (e.g. via Twitter) will enable users to ask questions to aggregated groups of real people in real time. Not so easy for site owners to optimize! Watch this space.

Mobile: marketing on the fourth screen

"Mr. Watson - come here - I want to see you." (A G Bell 1876)

My family and I just saw Coraline in 3D at our local cinema – it was absolutely fantastic. (Yes, it’s reached Europe at last!). The sound was great; no interruptions; totally immersive and escapist. It wouldn’t have been half the experience on TV. That got me thinking about screens: big and small.

Apart from our wrist-watch (maybe another blog post!) the smallest screen most of us regularly look at is our mobile phone (=cellphone). Apparently 7 out of 10 people now sleep next to their mobile phone (not sure how many of these phones are turned on).

It is generally (although not universally) agreed that the telephone was invented by Alexander Graham Bell. He was awarded the first U.S. patent for the telephone in 1876. The Bell Telephone Company was created in 1877, and by 1886, over 150,000 people in the U.S. owned telephones. In 1879, the Bell company acquired Thomas Edison's patents for the carbon microphone from Western Union. This made the telephone practical for long distances; it was no longer necessary to shout to be heard on the receiving telephone. It’s hard for us to imagine today what a change in people’s lives that was: to actually hear someone’s voice when they were physically many miles away. Bell envisaged that the telephone would be used for important things (like fire alarms or by Heads of State to discuss whether they should go to war or not) rather than for trivial chatter. But hey, you can’t win ‘em all.

But that was of course only the beginning. Today we have the iPhone: Touch screen, Voice, Music, SMS, Mobile Internet plus upwards of 30,000 apps. To mis-quote Fatboy Slim (and before him Virginia Slims cigarettes) in terms of telephony, "We’ve come a long way baby".

Today there are 1.3 billion fixed landline phones in the world.

950 million mobile phones were sold last year alone.

There are an estimated 4.1bn mobile phone subscriptions.

It is estimated that 74% of all mobile phone subscribers send and receive text messages on their phones.

There are more mobile phones than registered automobiles in the world today.

Not only is the growth of mobiles changing society in developed countries, but it is also dramatically changing the lives of people in developing countries. For instance in Kenya 1 in 3 adults owns a mobile device.

Within the next 5 to 10 years it is predicted that as much as 90% of the Earth's population will be actively using mobiles.

***A LITTLE HISTORY***
(you can skip this bit if you don’t find it as fascinating as I do).

The first mobile ‘phones arrived in the early 80s and were the size of a large brick. Above you can see Martin Cooper of Motorola with the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X which was originally launched in 1983.

Despite the bulk, it was an incredible and liberating thing to be able to take your telephone with you; unfettered by fixed lines and cables and even by the need to connect to a car battery as with previous ‘car telephones’. At first these devices were purely telephones without wires and there were problems with battery life, signal and sound quality.

The mobile phone started life as the two-way radio (or mobile rig). These were installed in vehicles e.g. taxi cabs, police cars and ambulances, although were not strictly ‘mobile phones’ as they weren't normally connected to a phone ‘network’. Although the earliest ‘mobile’ phones were installed permanently in vehicles, later versions, e.g. the transportables (or bag phones) could also be carried and used as mobile or as portable two-way radios.

The earliest true mobile telephones were dubbed ‘first generation’ mobile telephones, also called 1G. These devices were also called cellular mobile radio telephones, and were based on analogue signals.

Second generation (2G) mobile telephones were introduced in the 1990s. 2G mobile phone systems were different because of their use of digital circuit switched transmission and the introduction of advanced mobile phone to network signaling.

The birth of 2G systems saw telephones move from bulky 1G telephones to smaller hand-held items, which were much more portable. This change was made possible through technological developments including more advanced batteries and energy-saving electronics.

2G phones offered text messaging, initially on GSM networks and eventually on most digital networks. The very first machine-sent SMS text message was sent in 1991 in the UK. The first person-to-person text message was sent in 1993 in Finland. SMS messaging has become the communication method of choice for millions and many people now prefer sending SMS messages to placing voice calls.

The invention of 3G (third generation) technologies permitted network operators (e.g. Vodafone) to offer their users a wider range of more advanced services. These included video calls and wireless internet. Handsets with larger screens (first mono then colour) were launched to handle these new functionalities.

3G networks enable network operators to offer users a wider range of more advanced services while achieving greater network capacity through improved spectral efficiency. Services include wide-area wireless voice telephone, video calls and broadband wireless data, all in a mobile environment. 3G networks are basically wide-area cellular telephone networks that evolved to incorporate high-speed Internet access and video telephony.

Ever since the birth of 3G mobile phone technology, people have been talking about 4G. This technology will point to the future of mobile phones, creating the most advanced handsets and services yet. Services to be developed include live streaming of radio and TV programmes to 3G handsets with content owners including Disney recently announcing that they'll be offering these services.
***END OF HISTORY BIT***

The iPhone, with its touch-screen functionality, has changed the game and set a new standard. Apple’s iPhone is an internet-connected multimedia Smartphone. Since its minimal hardware interface lacks a physical keyboard, the multi-touch screen provides a ‘virtual keyboard’ when necessary. The iPhone functions as a camera phone (also including text messaging and visual voicemail), a portable media player (equivalent to an iPod), and provides Internet connectivity (with email, web browsing, and local Wi-Fi). Apple announced the iPhone on January 9, 2007, after months of rumors and speculation. The iPhone was introduced in the US on June 29, 2007 before being marketed worldwide. Time magazine named it the "Invention of the Year" in 2007.

So where will the development of mobile telephony end? Of course it won’t; so maybe we should ask instead: in what direction should it go? And what are the implications for marketers?

Today, more and more people are performing a wide range of daily functionalities through their mobile phones. In major parts of Asia and Africa mobile phones have completely replaced landlines as the major form of communications, since they require less infrastructure investment and are cheaper to operate. In Scandinavia and Eastern Europe parking your car involves paying for the meter via a mobile phone. In Israel there are more mobile phones than people and in addition to texting and calling, people are using their mobiles to shop, search, pay, play as well as communicate with the rest of the world.

Mobile applications will take another major step forward with the recent introduction by Google of the Android mobile operating system. Open source functionalities will open the market up, in the same way that open source programming did a few years back for Content Management Systems, Design and programming functionalities. The inevitable proliferation of widgets, tools, functionalities and channels will drive the market for new and better handsets.

So what are the mobile phone designers aiming to achieve? I suggest a number of things:

To produce a device that feels good, and looks good
- in many parts of the world and in many consumer segments, the mobile is a status symbol which says something about the owner. Young people often define themselves by their Mobile brand and its (interchangeable) cover. The jury is out on how small handsets can (and should) be; there is a trade-off between functionality and size/weight. Full 'Qwerty' keyboards, predictive text, touch screen, flip up lids? Business or gaming? Individual consumers also have specific priorities/ requirements.

and delivers on functionality
- voice, text, camera and mobile internet. Coming soon: video/ movies. Also QR (quick response) or 2D codes (on printed items e.g. magazines, flyers, posters, even buildings) will allow us to click on the code (i.e. scan it using the phone’s camera) and go straight to a mobile website (this technique is already widespread in Japan and S. Korea).

We now await the iPhone 3.0…

For marketers, Mobile devices present new opportunities and challenges. The mobile device is ‘always on’ (albeit sometimes on silent) , and most of us carry it with us throughout our waking hours. We can receive calls, voicemail messages, SMSs, emails, Facebook updates and Twitter streams. It is a very personal device; it is shared with no-one and we normally access it “in private”. It is even more interactive than our PC (voice is a powerful functionality!). On the downside, screen and keyboard size are limited.

UK Mobile Ad Spending doubled in 2008 (IAB = UK Interactive Advertising Bureau). This has big implications for the media industries in general, and advertising in particular. The recent big growth opportunity in advertising has been ‘online’ i.e. internet advertising (which now accounts for about 10% of the total global ad spending) and which has recently been gaining share at the expense of traditional mass media ad spend, with TV and magazines hard hit and newspapers really struggling. Let’s remember though that mobile is still only a tiny sliver of all interactive ads and represented only about 1% of the total global ad spend last year.

We can expect the national mobile ad spending numbers in advanced European mobile markets to echo UK numbers (Spain, Italy, Finland, Sweden, Austria, Ireland etc) and the other European markets (Germany, France, Switzerland, Poland etc) to follow a little later.

There are markets where mobile advertising is far more advanced than in the UK both in the types of ads, as well as in the proportion of the national ad spend. Japan and South Korea are clear global leaders here; Spain is well ahead of the UK as Europe's most advanced mobile advertising market. There are also ‘unlikely’ countries where the proportion of national ad spending on mobile is far ahead of that in the US and UK - India for example. In India the reach of internet based interactive ads is very limited, so from very early on, the Indian ad industry has reached for the mobile as an interactive channel; India has been very successful in developing advergames for mobile.

Nokia has famously dubbed the mobile phone “the fourth screen”.

Should content providers and advertisers seek to replicate the internet experience we have at our desks for mobile users? I suggest not.

After all, why do we still go to the movies? Big screen, great sound. Great all-round experience (better 3D and tactile sensations may be next). We don’t, in general, eat our dinner in the cinema and we can’t pause the movie to go to the bathroom. Equally, our laptop can go with us on the train or to a client’s office. I suggest for the foreseeable future, there will be distinct roles for Cinema, TV, PC/laptop and cellphone.

In the future, these devices will no longer be called 'cellphones'; they will be 'handhelds' or even 'communicators' (well it was good enough for Captain Kirk). Of course they are already computers; indeed today's high-end Smartphone can surpass the performance of a mid-range laptop computer of only 5 years ago. 4G networks promise ubiquitous fast mobile broadband connections, opening up all kinds of new mobile experiences.

So let’s not force mobile into a box labelled 'mobile internet'. Mobile is different and should be approached differently: used for what it is good at. On a small screen, people don’t want to read large amounts of text and, for my money, they won’t want to watch movies. Quick clips and small chunks of text: news headlines, weather forecasts, sports scores and pop videos being typical items. And let's not forget LOCATION. By definition, these devices are used on the move; location dependent content is highly relevant.

Advertising on mobiles should also be different from TV or PC-web: consider the user experience and situation and don’t ask people to do anything fiddly or requiring a lot of reading; a short mini-clip or an ‘awareness banner’ with a single click response is about the limit. Mobile is good at short messages- chunks of content. ‘Click to call’ is very powerful. So is anything dependent on location (where are my friends? The nearest restaurant? Subway station?). Mobile is great at some things and less good at others; as marketers we need to understand this and work with it. There is room in most people's lives for a range of screen sizes; we expect something different from each. After all, if mobile devices could do everything, we wouldn’t need laptops. Or cinemas.

"If you had come to me a hundred years ago, do you think I should have dreamed of the telephone? Why, even now I cannot understand it! I use it every day, I transact half my correspondence by means of it, but I don’t understand it. Think of that little stretched disk of iron at the end of a wire repeating in your ear not only sounds, but words—not only words, but all the most delicate and elusive inflections and nuances of tone which separate one human voice from another! Is not that something of a miracle?" Sir William Crookes, 'Pall Mall' (Jan 1903)

In many ways the mobile phone is miraculous. However: (and you may call me a dinosaur if you wish) I'm not planning to watch Coraline on my iPhone any day soon; thanks anyway (and that's not just because the 3D glasses would be a pain to carry around with me).

Video/ audio piracy: you hum it and I'll share it

Do you download music? If so, do you pay for it? Amazon, iTunes Store and Napster, among others, sell music downloads; simple to use, fast and legal. However it is estimated that 95% of music downloads are illegal. (IFPI 2009)

Recently four directors of the Swedish file sharing website, The Pirate Bay, were arrested, found guilty of ‘aiding and promoting copyright theft’ and sentenced to jail. There are powerful interests opposed to file sharing of music, TV and Movies.

In a simpler age, Sir Paul McCartney sang "You never give me your money". But in fact millions of people did, and plenty are still doing so; he recently pronounced the Pirate Bay verdict to be fair. However in a previous interview, Sir Paul (almost) admitted he would have ripped off music by Elvis and his other heroes if he’d had access to today’s technology back in the day (and I don’t think he meant that would only have applied to a few ‘scouser scallys’ either...) Herein lies the dilemma; is theft of IP the same as stealing money? Or a car? Or a DVD? Just because it's possible and un-policeable, should the copyright owners (music labels, movie studios, artists et al) give up and find another job?

Indeed, why should everything on the internet be free? Shouldn't talented people be able to earn a living by entertaining others? If not, who will choose to be: Actors/ Producers/ Musicians/ Journalists? Next time our mate offers us a memory stick/ DVD loaded with pirated content in the pub, should we pause to consider whether we may be stifling the career of the next Lady GaGa (actually, on second thoughts...OK bad example.) MySpace Music, and new sites like Spotify, Last.fm (as well as smaller rivals e.g. Deezer, Qtrax) are rewriting the rule book. Many questions remain: will advertisers support the new legal sources of free music? Will consumers accept some ads as their price for getting their favourite music for nothing? Will the premium services sell?

Of course the music labels were in a difficult situation; the technology moved so fast that they lost the initiative and lost control. So did they give up or fight? The former was commercial suicide and thus not an option. But how to fight? The internet is not going away. File sharing will only get easier. DRM (Digital Rights Management) is both universally hated and fraught with difficulties (e.g. how many computers can you download the protected track onto? If 3 computers, is this admitting that you and 2 mates can have the song for your 79p? What happens if your laptop is stolen or your hard drive crashes?) So, perhaps the best alternative model is that you pay once then the music is yours forever. The retailer (e.g. Amazon or iTunes) is tacitly accepting that you will share with your mates but at least ONE of you has paid! DRM-protected music is now effectively finished, with both iTunes and Amazon’s MP3 download service abandoning it. Some would say the Music Industry, under pressure from market forces, has at last accepted reality.

Strange things are happening at the moment. Madonna has done a ‘360 deal’ with concert promoter Live Nation; recorded music sales are way down the list of the ways she will make money. Radiohead invited us to decide how much we wanted to pay for In Rainbows (I still feel uncomfortable about what I paid, but I don't think I should, having paid top-dollar for their previous albums). Lily Allen, Kate Nash and the Arctic Monkeys broke on MySpace and YouTube. will.i.am happily gives his music away and makes money from touring and merchandise.

As we have noticed, there is a recession right now; indeed Sir Elton John and Sir Paul McCartney each just lost £60 million of their net worth. But we shouldn't worry about these Rock Knights. They've made their money and they can make more from touring, advertising, publishing, sponsorship and merchandise.

There is something much bigger going on here than the current recession. It’s the new up-and-coming acts who might just find it too tough to break into the mainstream i.e. to make it pay so that they give up and as a result less new music is made and all we are left with is the Knights’ back catalogue, Sir Cliff’s latest Christmas Single (on mp3 and vinyl naturally) and the winning song from the latest TV talent contest.

Currently, what has happened in Music currently shows few signs of happening in TV/ Movies. The movie and TV studios are currently fighting tooth and nail to stamp out piracy; they want you to go to the Movies, buy the DVD, or at least rent from someone who has bought it. Maybe they will move their position once people stop buying DVDs as they have done with CDs. Until then DRM is very much alive as regards video content. DVDs now come with an anti piracy warning; “You wouldn't steal a car...handbag...mobile phone...piracy is theft” etc. Strong stuff.

Throughout history, technological change has caused upheaval and conflict, as established structures, industries and personal fortunes are threatened and even wiped out. The Luddites fought against mechanization of the mills. There was a powerful lobby defending the canal industry when it became threatened by railways. However machines and railways won. Today, Newspapers and Travel Agents are struggling as consumer habits change. The internet has compelled the music business to re-evaluate its business model; once again technology has forced changes in the economy and indeed in society. Maybe the movie business is next. As we all know, the internet is a powerful agent of change and it seems certain that we "ain’t seen nothing yet".

Branding: 'plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.'

(aka ‘there’s nothing new under the sun’)

Marketing Week has just been redesigned (for non-UK or non-marketing readers, it’s a magazine and of course a website). That got me thinking about how much things are changing in marketing right now.

A few years ago I wrote a book about marketing. Here is a short extract. (well it’s my blog after all).

“The marketing world is changing fundamentally...Direct Marketing, Sales Promotion and Advertising can never again be viewed as discrete, non-overlapping disciplines…marketing communications must, in addition to being creative, also be relevant…this requires targeting…individuals can supply information about themselves which assists the advertiser’s efforts to direct relevant messages.”

I was arguing that general (‘image’) advertisers could learn from the DM people as regards to creating a dialogue with the audience and using data intelligently to target appropriate marketing communications.

A far more illustrious author, David Ogilvy, founder of Ogilvy and Mather and one of the original ‘Mad Men’, once wrote in the same vein (but more succinctly):

“One day all agencies will be direct marketing agencies.”

Since the great man committed this to paper, there has certainly been a massive change in marketing, namely the arrival of the internet. After the ‘false start’ of the first internet boom, marketing on the web, online, digital, call it what you will, has come back big time, as was inevitable. For marketers, it offers many of the most powerful features of traditional TV, press and radio advertising, combined with the convenience of being able to make an immediate response without the need to clip a coupon, post back a reply card or even reach for the phone (this inherent responsiveness was one of the key qualities of DM which Ogilvy admired). A response can be immediately rewarded with relevant additional information. DM people used to dream about such media! Today’s online display advertising can include rich media, with the user in control of expanding the banner, playing the film, and turning the sound on or off. i.e. this is something like TV advertising with a supercharged remote control. But we're not just talking about buying ‘space’ on websites. Indeed, the new social media are offering fresh marketing opportunities which are currently little understood. And as we carry around increasingly powerful computing devices in our pockets, mobile marketing is looking likely to be the ‘next big thing’.

These changes have already had structural repercussions for the marketing industry which are not over yet. Client companies have created ‘Head of Digital Marketing’ roles. Specialist digital agencies have grown up, profiting from the ever-growing ‘niche’ that is digital marketing. Traditional agencies, some moving a little more slowly than others, have tried to get into digital by parachuting in digital ‘experts’, with varying degrees of success. All are reviewing their business models. They are aiming at a moving target, since digital marketing is itself changing at a bewildering rate. How can a Marketing Director decide what % of the budget (already under massive pressure from the CFO and CEO) to invest in Social Media? Or Virtual Worlds? Or Mobile? Has Twitter peaked? What will replace it? Or is it the new Facebook? Some technologies and brands will fall by the wayside; others will prosper. How to select the winners and subsequently demonstrate ROI from each element of the (digitally enhanced) marketing mix, separately and in combination?

Agencies of all colours will naturally seek to present themselves as the clients’ counsellors, offering to guide them through the changing media landscape; but will the clients believe they are indeed unbiased expert advisers? Meanwhile the technology keeps moving forward. There are new developments seemingly every week and no-one can afford to be left behind (or even to appear to be!). We are living in interesting times.

Yet in many ways things haven’t changed that much. As of old, agencies love to introduce labels, in order to carve out a specialism which affords them the closest they can get to a (hopefully profitable) USP. Hence today we have specialist digital agencies and even specialist SEO, Affiliate and Mobile agencies. Many are thriving, even in the current climate. Clients on the other hand, are generally less excited about how their agency tags itself and more concerned with getting the job done. Same old same old…

People are talking (recently) about Integrated Marketing . But of course this isn’t new either; (see my quote above). It’s always been the Marketing Director’s job to orchestrate integrated marketing; the challenge today, as always, is how to achieve this. As ever, there is a range of possible solutions. There is undoubtedly room for ‘full-service’ digital agencies (AKQA has just launched a media department). There is also a role for specialist Search, Affiliate and Mobile consultancies. Digital agency Glue London is now doing some ‘above the line’ advertising for its clients. Traditional media, although under pressure, still accounts for more than 50% of most marketing budgets. In today’s digital marketing world, there’s still room for a range of agency specialists in offline and online disciplines so long as they respect each other’s roles and work together for the greater good of the brand.

Let’s just pause to remember why we are spending clients' shareholders’ money on marketing communications: two giants of 20th century marketing were in no doubt:

David Ogilvy told his staff: "we sell - or else."

and Raymond Rubicam, founder of Young and Rubicam, famously said:

"The only purpose of advertising is to sell. It has no other justification worth mentioning."

If we replace ‘advertising’ with the broader term ‘marketing communications’, I suggest this is still a useful mantra for today’s marketers. Maybe not immediate sales. But soon. And of course we can only sell effectively if we are targeting the right people with engaging messages; indeed digital marketing increasingly offers powerful techniques to enable us to serve the right message to the right person at the right time (see behavioural targeting)…

Both Ogilvy and Rubicam preached about the need to define what your brand stands for: i.e. establish its brand essence (or USP, the 'Unique Selling Proposition' first articulated by Rosser Reeves) and then communicate this to the defined target audience: creatively, confidently and consistently over time. Easy to say and challenging to deliver: no change there either.

So Good Luck to Marketing Week (and of course marketingweek.co.uk). Today, more than ever, marketers need to keep up with the news and to share best practice. As marketers, we all believe in strong design in order better to communicate high-quality content. As many famous long-lived brands (including Heinz, Nescafé, Kodak and Brylcreem) are well aware, this requires periodic refreshment. And of course there are lots of new things for us to learn about- especially in the digital space. Today’s digital marketing certainly requires a raft of creative and developer ‘craft skills’ unknown to David Ogilvy and those sharp-suited, immaculately Brylcreemed ‘Mad Men’.

However: just because it’s new, doesn’t mean it’s any good; or right for the brand, or a better use of budget than ‘old’ techniques. So let’s embrace digital, reaching and engaging our target audience in their increasingly online lives BUT let’s not allow these wonderful and exciting new technologies opening up seemingly every week to dazzle us and to distract us from the fundamentals of branding and marketing as espoused by Messrs Ogilvy and Rubicam. These principles are unchangingly valid and will still hold good when we have at our disposal marketing channels we can’t even imagine today.

These are a few of my favourite things (2)

- Cool Digital Stuff (no credit or liability sought or accepted).

You know how it is. Sometimes, in fact often, one comes across something in the wonderful world of the web which is just too good to keep to yourself. Yes I am aware that many will have seen these before. But if one person discovers something here and gets joy or inspiration from it and shares it then... Well you get the idea. Enjoy.

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Serious stuff

Those in digital marketing need to be aware of what ‘normal’ people are thinking. Here are two points of view:

savetheinternet.com

and an article from Privacy International

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Creative stuff

Just great

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Lastly, two takes on some interesting new (ish) technology

Microsoft Surface

and the spoof version

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Microblogging: might as well face it, you’re addicted to Twitter

If we do something which we enjoy, it's entirely rational and indeed human to seek to repeat the experience to achieve the same gratification again; especially if one feels able to afford the money and time required and it apparently does no-one any harm. To some extent we are all susceptible; but when and why does an acceptable habit/ hobby become an addiction?

Of course it’s a matter of degree and it comes down to this: some people just have addictive personalities. If you have a basic susceptibility, you can choose from alcohol, narcotics, the slots in Vegas, Grand Theft Auto, porn, rewatching Season Four of Friends (“soooo much sharper on Blu-Ray”) repurchasing (again) the entire Beatles back catalogue (“sooooo much clearer with the new digital remastering”) or buying the new Manchester United 'Away Kit' for the boy (“he’d be bullied at school if he didn’t have it”).

Twitter is certainly the new social media phenomenon: its traffic has grown 900 per cent in just one year, politicians, celebrities, athletes and business leaders have made headlines with their tweets.

Twitter received four million unique visitors for the month of February, up from 123,000 from the same month last year. It's made a massive jump from 14th most popular social-networking site on the Internet to No. 3, behind Facebook and MySpace (for now).

And so it was inevitable that as Twitter took off, it would touch certain people who are natural addicts and yes you guessed it, they are now ‘Twitter addicts’. To use the slightly ‘naff’ jargon of the Twitterati (oops! there I go myself) they are Twitterholics. And yes, also inevitably there are online forums and websites to help such people.

The more light-hearted online mentions of this subject include 5 tell-tail signs:

• You name your first child @babygirl1 (and, naturally, you tweet during the birth)
• Your Mom joins Twitter in order to contact you
• You complain when your kids don’t ‘retweet’ you
• You never say or write anything using more than 140 characters
• You start to ‘unfollow’ people in real life (believe me, they don’t like it!)

On a more serious note, Tweeters can find themselves neglecting their responsibilities and suffering accordingly (family , friends, schoolwork , job) which is a good time to admit that you are spending too much time on Twitter and resolve to limit one's ‘tweet time’.

Many people I know are on LinkedIn for business and Facebook (or MySpace) for social interaction; most successfully separate the two and project suitably different personas in each; after all, we all dress for work (even if it’s polo shirts and chinos rather than white shirts and dark suits depending on where we work and whether our job title contains the word ‘digital’). With Twitter it can be difficult to tell where social stops and business starts and having two separate Twitter accounts is a step too far for most mortals.

I suggest each of us should decide why we are using social media including Twitter and set ourselves objectives; i.e. ask "what are we seeking to get out?" This is a necessary first step to evaluating against what we are putting in and so checking that the balance is working for us.

The reality is that sometimes it's necessary for us children to finish our homework before we go out to play. Of course it gets a bit more complex when the homework is actually blurred with play. In reality, few of us can be Madonna’s tour manager, the chief designer at Ferrari, or the lead technical developer on Oblivion 2 /The Elder Scrolls V and even if we are, we still need to compartmentalize and juggle our lives; work/ business/ home/ family/ friends. Twitter and other social media tools can be part of achieving that healthy balance. If we get it right we should be HAPPY.

OK that’s more philosophy that you usually get from this blog. Must get back to doing something useful…

So by all means follow me on Twitter ; just keep it under control, OK?

Data privacy: 'I am not a number; I am a FREE MAN!'

(No. 6 in The Prisoner, ITC 1967-1968)


In the UK, Internet service providers must now keep records of emails and online phone calls under controversial new government regulations which came into force this week.

In the internet age, does our right, as citizens of a ‘free’ society, to enjoy privacy inevitably conflict with the responsibility of governments to keep us secure and with the objectives of marketers to sell us products and services?

As internet marketers, we have an ever growing arsenal of analytics tools available to monitor and study visitors’ behaviour on our site, where they came from and at what point we lose them. Behavioural targeting offers the ‘silver bullet’ of directing our message with minimum wastage.

As consumers, we are increasingly leaving a trail of internet footprints revealing much about our online habits and thus about ourselves. Should this worry us?

What will be the end-result of this growing lack of privacy? What happens when everything we do is monitored and recorded?

In 1949, English novelist George Orwell published his most famous novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four. The nightmarish vision of a society controlled by a totalitarian regime which monitors every citizen 24/7 and consequently knows everything about them has given the English language several phrases, including 'Room 101' (the worst place in the world) the 'Thought Police' and most memorably 'Big Brother is Watching You'.

1984 has come and gone but 25 years later, many fear that much of this ‘Orwellian vision’ is coming true. The Government and ‘Big Business’ know more about us than ever before. The internet revolution has further complicated the complex set of issues surrounding the collection and manipulation of personal data about individual citizens by Government and corporations.

Most of us accept CCTV cameras as a necessary evil since we believe they will protect us from crime (or because we don’t really think about it!). But how much solid evidence is there that CCTV has brought about changes in the way that criminals behave i.e. that it has, in fact, made people more secure or safe? And what is the cost? We are being watched and potentially permanently recorded when we go shopping, park our car, wait for a train. Again, is this a price we are happy to pay?

Does the British Government need ID cards to combat terrorism? Many would suggest that those capable of coordinating a terrorist attack in the UK re not going to be defeated by ID cards. They would be able to obtain fraudulent ID. And what of the effect on the privacy of the rest of us, who are no threat to the security of The Realm i.e. people who won't buy or fraudulently obtain a card? Wired.co.uk reports that the British Police have identified a number of children at risk of being 'radicalised' and presumably of becoming terrorists. So what action is it reasonable to take against or 'to help' them?

Some would say that the only way of preventing all terrorism, or all child abuse, is to create a society where no-one can ‘get away’ with anything. And in that scenario we would all be living in a prison i.e. we’d be back to Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Cory Doctorow, the author and 'electronic freedom frontier man', maintains there is a false hope in these scenaria. "You can't get to the guilty by persecuting the innocent."

There is a real danger that in today’s digital society both authorities and brands may be accumulating increasing quantities of data for which there is no practical use; i.e. we are collecting it out of habit, or just because we can.

Meanwhile, Google is developing new mapping/ geographical imaging/ location-based products. They seek to be the most comprehensive search engine and reference source, so that their revenue stream continues. The more people use these tools, the more people are drawn to Google, which is good for business. They are already inevitably coming up against privacy issues, especially with Street View and Latitude.

So what does all this mean for internet marketers?

In my experience, most consumers will happily share a certain amount of personal data so long as they are fully and clearly informed how it will be used and stored, and they can see a benefit to them in providing it.

This of course depends on the context, whether they TRUST the brand/ company and whether they believe the company has a valid reason for requesting the information.

In today’s digital economy, marketers must recognize that the consumer is in the driving seat... it should be more about making sure that the information on a product is accurate and available when required, than trying to sell people stuff via old-school interruptive techniques. As soon as a company asks for contact information, people get suspicious - indeed there are websites out there designed to help you avoid revealing your true identity or email to companies.

These are not easy issues.

Companies need to be respectful of the privacy of their customers, and avoid asking them to register unless they are offering the customer something of tangible value in return - more than a stream of product information. For example, if a hayfever remedy brand sets up a support group for people with hayfever and provides high-quality unique content on a dedicated website, that would be a good use of people's details, whereas collecting emails to send monthly promotions for their latest product might not (and indeed is likely to be counter-productive). Increasingly the majority of consumers are internet-savvy and are prepared to trade data for added value (e.g. exclusive content or special offers); they just require a sufficient incentive.

As marketers have increasingly powerful targeting techniques at their disposal, TRUST becomes even more important. Trust is difficult to earn and easily lost. Privacy concerns are very real and brands need to understand and respect them.

As we know, the internet has already changed the world; and it’s not done yet.

My favourite Blogs

One of the best things about working in a lively office is the water cooler stuff; someone saying something that makes you laugh, cry, THINK. Today the office can be global and you can chose your water cooler mates. Pretty cool eh?

I read these because each of them gives me something different and each frequently transports me to another world (in a good way). I urge you to check them out and decide whether they speak to you; I hope so.


http://farisyakob.typepad.com/ (this guy really knows his stuff)

http://neilperkin.typepad.com (aka Only Dead Fish)

http://mashable.com/ (always something new and thought-provoking)

http://www.contagiousmagazine.com
(OK it’s a 'magazine', not a blog. But why split hairs? Just read it, will you?)

http://caliinsecondlife.blogspot.com
(This woman invented virtual worlds. Or something.)

Awareness or response?

At the risk of stating the obvious, advertising is changing.

Today I saw an ad on the London Underground for Abbey Bank (part of Santander group). They currently probably wish they were still a Building Society like good old Nationwide (whose current advertising seems to be suggesting they are too boring to take any risks with your money). However this is by the by.

I don't remember much about the ad but I did notice the call to action:

“Visit your local branch or abbey.com”

6 words.

Hurrah! At last we seem to be freed from "www". Not to mention "http://".

Didn’t take long, did it?

If one types "abbey.com" into Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome, one duly gets straight to the Abbey Home Page. It also worked on my Blackberry. Job done.

Admittedly, at Oxford Circus, I couldn’t click on a 2D code to view the mobile website for full information. Indeed I couldn’t even get a mobile signal on the tube. But these things will soon change. Indeed if your brand is well known and you’ve bought all the right urls, it could be argued that you don't even need to promote the website on your ads; people will find "abbey.com" anyway.

There was a time when certain ads were deemed to be ‘image/ awareness’ and others ‘direct response’. The Ad Agency Art Director fought bitterly against cluttering up the former with as much as a phone number (frequently creating a work of what Elvis Costello has termed ‘useless beauty’), while the latter was delegated to a junior team and often ended up as a cluttered mess, pulling response at the expense of the brand image.

Those days are gone. Today, thanks to the internet, every marketing communication can create and reinforce brand image and promote response/ dialogue via whatever medium the consumer prefers.

Today, all ads are 'above the line'. And response drivers.