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Execution of a message is what makes the idea memorable.
WATER. I had this sent to me from a friend, Lalith Dassenaike, who works at Cigar, an organization that deals in water management and sustainable development, among other things. It’s a long commercial for Evian, that takes a different look at the lifecycle of a drop of water.
CHILDCARE. This execution about a different kind of childcare, demonstrates an interesting use of outdoor messaging by Grey Worldwide, Mumbai.
If you have any fine examples of how great execution makes a simple idea stand out, please send it my way.
WATER. , again. For World Water Day, 2006, Green Belgium placed these stickers inside wash basins of cinemas, restaurants, pubs etc in Belgium and Mexico City. The stickers photographs of a child’s face, placed in such a way that his mouth is exactly positioned where the water goes down the sink. You get the idea… See story here.
What are advertisers thinking? Or tearing their hair about? The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) is a body of more than 350 members, and this includes all the brand names that advertise nationally and globally.
Of about twenty committees, almost all of them list as ‘prevalent topics’ things like media and audience measurement, ROI, Integrated Marketing Communications, optimization, addressable TV, and PVR’s (personal video recorders.)
As can be expected, the ‘advertising’ committee and the ‘new technologies’ committee appear very keen on the issues of audience measurement, optimization, and TiVo. So if you were to read between the bullet points, you can see that the migration of advertising from the mainstream media to online opens up a lot of concerns, and a brand new set of needs.
I thought it was interesting that while TiVo was mentioned many times, another brand that is causing a lot of ripples in Madison Avenue and Hollywood was not mentioned: iTunes. Nor was YouTube, or MySpace. Hmmm.
But that is not to say they are not concerned. I clicked around and found that the new tech committee is in fact keeping an open ear for how other brands –I mean issues— such as Google, AOL, and Novartis can shed some light. The latter does not have a migraine-inducing ‘platform’ like PVRs or RSS, but the ANA was interested in the use of an ‘advergame’ called Zone Quest. In case you are wondering, Zone Quest is described as “a fun way to remind you of the importance of making healthy lifestyle choices to keep your blood pressure ‘in the zone’.”
Why am I interested in this? I come across tons of stories that deal with how poorly advertisers are responding to the emerging media, and how unprepared they are to meet the onslaught of the technologies arriving every day that circumvent advertising. They are indeed turning the ship around, allocating large portions of theie media budgets to online strategies. They are quite miffed by TV, and are ‘very dissatisfied’ with upfronts. This was from a survey of ANA members in 2004.
Imagine what they must think two years later…
Jonah Bloom’s column in Ad Age makes an important point, commenting on how the Net changes, and not just replaces traditional media and marketing. He is right. Convergence and Search are like two big tornadoes touching down on media and marketing.
He did not deal with the shift to mobile, however, which is not a separate tornado, but one that will define the path it takes.
Speaking of mobile, I listened to a Deloitte podcast this morning about Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs) where they talk of how digitization and fragmentation are forcing marketers to realize that they "need to to live where your customers are" –even if it means creating their own media space via a virtual network. Sainsbury’s, the grocery store in the UK, for instance has Sainsbury’s Mobile that is more than a pre-paid phone; it is there to drive store traffic, they point out.
Mobile devices, likewise will change the way other media operate, and how marketers and customers connect with each other. Why sink a few hundred thousand dollars to put up your ad on network TV, when you can host it for afraction of the cost on a server, and get people to stream it to their mobile phone? Not that television hasn’t thought about this already. Ever heard of the ESPN mobile phone? Another MVNO. Their line, ‘Life will never get in the way of your sports again" should be translated (for media and advertising types) as "distribution should never get in the way of your content again."
This is Friedman’s flat-earth theory, with media ramifications.
This conference is worth watching. Called F2C: Freedom to Connect 2006, it is based on the assumption that the Freedom to Connect falls into the same category as Freedom of Speech, Press, Religion and Assembly.
"Each of these freedoms is related to the others and depends on the others, but stands distinct. Freedom to Connect, too, depends on the other four but carries its own meaning."
It’s about technology and policy, but as it is becoming so clear now, connectivity tips the balance of power toward consumers, and the outcome of a conference like this will make the powers that be very, very scared. The electronic democracy is just waking up.
If you’ve ever used a service from PhotoStamps.com you’ll know that one of the no-nos in that service was that you couldn’t create a perfectly legal 0.39 cents postage stamp with a company logo. (They also disallowed anything obscene, offensive, pornographic, libelous …even convicted criminals or politicians, celebrities etc.)
It was great for ‘vanity’ stamps of your family, or favorite photo. It was great for companies promoting some icon or idea. I had contacted PhotoStamps twice and they first said no to a stamp-logo, but then when they said they printed it, the order never arrived. Perhaps it was their way of enforcing the rule. Hopefully that wrinkle will be removed.
There’s news that the Post office has approved the use of commeccial images for stamps. Zazzle.com is one company who does it. It’s $16.99 for a sheet of 20 stamps. You could get the many denominations apart from the 0.39 cent variety.
While music and podcasting gingerly shake hands, podcasting and advertising are doing high-fives. Podcasters know they are sitting on a gold mine since their overheads are low, and they can create fresh content faster than corporate radio can. Advertisers will find these niches very useful, and worth a shot. Take a look at the companies registered at the Portable Media Expo in September this year.
Podtrac is an interesting company to watch, because it takes on the role that advertising agencies (at least their media buying departments) once controlled. They serve podcasters and advertisers, providing the former with targeting and tracking tools. Free measurement is also thrown in for Podcasters. Revenue will be through ads, sponsorshipe and sales.
You could tell how new the business model is by the fact that the site has a link to a page titled What is podcasting. Presumably many of the older ad agencies are still wondering if this locomotive too, like Blogging, will roll through their bucolic land and disrupt their picnic.
So ROI is coming to a billboard near you. The story yesterday in the Tribune, of a Chandler, Arizona company’s technology that can ID the radio station of a car passing by, is almost like the story of RFID tags for patients.
But not quite. MobilTrak detectors are attached to billboards that read the radio frequencies of vehicles on California freeways –not the identities of the cars themselves. Then, by coss referencing this with radio listener demographics, companies can serve up ads that are relevant.
That’s the theory. In practice, it will be limited to digital billboards, and targeting will not be able to serve on-to-one ads (since many vehicles with very different demographic could pass a billboard at any given time.) But at least, the information could give advertisers hard numbers to go by.
In a world where everything in marketing is more or less measurable, this is one more piece in the ROI puzzle.
More iPods are appearing in schools -as a faculty requirement. See this story on how a Georgia State University has one history lecturer requires that students download 39 films on video iPods "so she doesn’t have to spend class time screening the movies."
What an amazing marketing and PR coup for iPod, especuially a story with references such as how the faculty wants to find "more strategic uses for the popular digital music and video players" and how staff and faculty have formed a team called "iDreamers."
The school has some 400 college owned iPods in use. A lot like Macs in the early days, right?
John Cass’s post, commenting on Walter William’s Journalist’s Creed brings up an interesting question about the blogger/journalist mindset.
His eight-part creed of sorts is acknowledgement that a blogger has to walk the fine line between credibility and responsibility.
I thought this topic is very valuable since the ‘who is a blogger’ question keeps cropping up from all angles. I listened to an IT Conversations podcast –an interview– where Dan Gillmor illuminates this very clearly. He talks of situations when a blogger who is not a professional journalist, sometimes commits an act of journalism. Does this person have to follow the guidelines that professional journalists do? I’m not talking of bias and transparency, but the legal implications. Gillmor’s fear is that one day a blogger, not understanding freedom of speech laws, will libel someone and be held accountable.
If you were to take a picture of a store employee yelling at a customer, and blogged about it, you would supposedly be doing ‘an act of journalism,’ in the same way that the person who captured the panic in the London Underground on a cell phone was momentarily –but not professionally –a journalist.
Should we then develop a blogger’s creed that gives those of us who write/report something to adhere to? Perhaps Gillmor’s Center for Citizen Media should consider it.
In Dave Kusek and Gerd Leonards book, The Future of Music, the authors practically warn music companies that if they don’t embrace customers and respect artists, they will be steamrolled into the digital landfill.
This story in Forbes, about Tower Records indicates that some companies have got the message. It is a podcast service called TowerPod.com that allows listeners to create podcasts and audio shows using music from the site.
The company will pick up revenue from advertising it will slot into the podcasts –and share the revenue with those who created the podcasts! Marketing folk will obviously see an opening here to (a) buy these advertising slots, and (b) create their own podcasts since it opens a new distribution channel with strong brand recognition –alongside iTunes, of course.
The book’s main thesis, ‘music like water’ talks of music returning to a service once again, after being trapped in the productized format, the CD, tape and vinyl. I can see podcasting as just the tip of the spear of content distribution and sponsored communication. It will leap into newer formats when mobile phones (our future MP3 players) become the interface for such music services.
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