A Million Little TV Spots
When I hear that the ad agencies and ad networks are starting to play nice together, I’m struck by the fact that the conversation keeps focusing on how large media clients are going to better utilize the new technologies afforded to them by microtargeting, mass personalization, and segmentation.
It’s as though, having shown up for a rugby match dressed for badminton, Publicis and WPP have decided to put on a brave face and hope for the best.
There has been, is now and will always be a place for broad campaigns aimed at driving brand awareness, and herding a large group of people towards satisfying the desires of a single, huge, business.
But there is a larger need for a mechanism that allows a hundred million small enterprises to market their goods, services and themselves to a similarly small and scattered audience - and audience measured in dozens or hundreds, not millions.
The big agencies continue to try and figure out how to play the “new” media by the old rules. They ask, “how can I build a viral campaign that spreads my message far and wide?” “How can I use social media to get people to talk about how much they love my brand?”
For decades, global business - brands and the companies that support them - have lurched towards ever greater conglomeration, going for scale and scope.
But the digital advertising landscape is built for a different kind of scope: it is engineered for point-to-point communication which, although usable in a large broadcast model, isn’t optimized for one-way message delivery. Why do brand managers and their agency partners fret over how to handle negative feedback online? Why do they try to fine-tune their placements so that video overlay ads show up only on content they deem “brand-appropriate?” Why do they struggle with content- and keyword-targeted campaigns, throwing armloads full of cash at a medium where the best results are achieved not with a broad-based “messaging” campaign, but with a hundred thousand individual conversations.
Why are WPP, Publicis and now Google and Microsoft working together to develop new ad formats for digital media?
What happens when Unilever’s ads for Dove soap get elbowed out of their “prime” advertising space by 1,000 artisans selling hand-made goat-milk soap, who join together in a loose social group and collectively purchase $20 million worth of in-video ads on YouTube?
Who’s going to knit that group together? Who’s going to provide them with the technology and creative backing to develop that campaign? Who’s going to place it, bid for the space, monitor and fine-tune performance?
Does the world inexorably move towards larger and larger enterprises selling more and more of the same stuff to everyone, or is there a point at which smaller becomes better?
2 years ago • NotesThis is going to be big: Virtual DVR gets the green light; Digital marketers to become the new “traditional”
To date, the convergence of digital media and television (a distinction which, post-6/19 is largely semantic) has been stymied by one fundamental difference between these media: time sequencing.
Despite TiVo and OnDemand and Slingbox and others, television is still largely - for most people - a time-bound medium. Even though many cable, sattelite and over-the-air viewers are able to time-shift their TV schedules, most television viewing is still conducting in “real time.”
Now, some programming simply won’t be time-shifted; sporting events and news, for example, lose their value over time. Can you imagine tuning in for the Superbowl three days after everyone else? Do you really want tomorrow’s weather report two days from now? (The exception might be for sports fanatics, who want to watch 15 football games from over the weekend but can’t actually do it all at once; so they time-shift some of the games into subsequent days of the week.)
“Water-cooler” shows are another exception: no point in watching Survivor after everyone has already talked about it the next day. (Actually, I don’t know that there’s ever a point in watching Survivor, but maybe I’m the exception.)
But with 500-channel cable and sattelite lineups routinely accessible, time-shifting becomes less of a luxury and more of a “necessity”, at least in terms of people maximizing their leisure time. With so many choices, it’s unlikely that everything you’d care to watch is on in precisely the right order on precisely those days of the week when you’d want to watch them. So you set your Digital Video Recorder to tape the shows you want, and they’re ready for you, when you’re ready.
There are a couple of problems here, that keep this from being practical for everyone:
- You likely don’t have space on your DVR to record everything you’d want
- You can’t record something in the past (say, the first three episodes of Big Love that you missed before all your friends were talking about it.)
- You can’t record something you don’t already know about (this is a variation of number 2.)
There are other issues, too, in terms of the usability and practicality of some DVR’s interfaces and ability to put the show you want to watch where you want to watch it. (For instance, to play an episode of Jon & Kate Plus 8 minus their marraige on your iPhone while waiting to clear customs at Gatwick.) I’ll cover those later.
If I haven’t already bored you to tears, let me get to the point.
This week, the U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way for Cablevision to start offering Virtual DVRs. This is important for marketers because Cabelvision and other cable and wireless network operators can combine virtual DVRs with a couple of other technologies, and fundamentally change the landscape of entertainment.
With a virtual DVR, the recording resides not on a box on your entertainment system, but at the cable company. Your recording is shared with everyone else - so rather than store 100,000 copies of Most Dangerous Catch, Cablevision stores just one copy and anyone can start watching it whenever they want.
- This eliminates most of the storage capacity problems, not only by centralizing storage of programming, but also by eliminating 99% of the redundancy.
- If the recording resides at the cable company, it can be instantly delivered anywhere there is sufficient bandwidth - to your TV, your phone, or a flat screen in a hotel room.
So, you can watch anything you want, anywhere you are, anytime you like. Aside from being kind of neat, why does that matter?
It matters because all of the world’s entertainment content is now digitized and delivered on-demand. And for it to be delivered to you on demand, the cable company needs to know where to send it when you ask.
Which means that they are sending you a video stream, digitized, to an addressable device registered in your name. Sound familiar?
It’s called YouTube.
Now, if only there were a platform out there which could embed, in real-time, advertising that was targeting specifically to each viewer, either as part of that video stream or as a companion piece of data displayed along side of it.
That’s called AdWords.
Even though the first itteration of addressable tv commercials has been scrapped, a new launch date is set for the end of 2009. Still, the technology already exists to deploy this all pretty much right now. (And as much of a fan of Google’s tools as I am, they’re not the only player - there are other ad delivery platforms and video streaming services, and they just need to be linked up; Google just happens to be there already.)
This isn’t about watching YouTube on your 56 inch LCD screen in your living room, or having to endure text ads running alongside NBC Nightly News. When technologies converge, it’s rarely in the form of one technology simply expanding into another technology’s space. Rather, the best elements from two technologies are combined to create something new.
So let’s review:
- Virtual DVR brings the public an unlimited quantity of high quality programming that they currently want to watch (and don’t have to find), delivered digitally in a personal, and personalizable stream.
- Online advertising gives marketers a platform to develop, target, and deploy advertising in a highly personal way; content producers have a platform on which to sell ad space (either directly negotiated or in an auction model.)
For marketers who have spent a lot of time building large branding campaigns predicated on a broadcast model, I have some bad news: the world is going to get unmanageably complex, and that model is going to break. It may not happen right away, but it will happen.
For marketers who have been deciphering the complexities of micro-targeted online advertising, the landscape is about to open up.
2 years ago • NotesDesign vs. Usability: A False Dichotomy
The battle, silly as it is, continues.
There are some good arguments here, namely: the quality of a site’s design has at least as much impact as usability on the site’s overall performance (that is, the site’s ability to support a business’s objectives by helping customers accomplish what they want to accomplish.)
Like any first impression, a bad visual design can undermine even the best usability, just as poor usability can undermine even the most brilliant visual design.
But there are some problematic statements in this article: First, the comment that “In such studies, participants have a set of specific tasks to accomplish, and thus their gaze tends to focus on navigation links, titles, labels, and interface controls such as buttons and form fields,” is misleading. Many studies like this are in fact either open-ended, or loosely directed; participants are asked what kinds of tasks they normally try to accomplish online, and then asked to do those things in the lab environment. In an eCommerce evaluation, for example, users are asked to purchase something they would normally purchase online, but to just do so in the lab.
Setting up a counter-argument to Jakob Nielsen, though, is just too easy and, for the author of this article, intellectually lazy: Neilsen intentionally writes with a bombastic style, mostly because the first 30 years of his publishing life were spent trying to get anyone to listen. (And besides, he never actually asserts that graphics have no effect on his participants’ experiences, he just points out that there is no evidence suggesting that the graphic elements make any meaningful contribution to1 user’s outcomes or preferences.)
Finally, it’s unfair to attempt to ferret out focus-group-like conclusions from a usability evaluation, even an eyetracking one. Eyetracking evaluations require only a dozen or so users in order to produce valid, reliable data; a study in which you wanted to evaluate attitudes and preferences would require hundreds of users in multiple locations in order to produce statistically-reliable conclusions. One reason to do this is to reduce the effects of group-think and self-censorship that often rear their heads in focus groups.
Lips can deceive, but the eyes don’t lie.
All of that is besides the point, though, because it plays into the well-worn meme of design vs. usability. I can understand the roots of this dichotomy (it’s another variation of the liberal arts vs. “hard” sciences debate), but I just don’t understand why it still persists. They are two sides to the same coin, and neither is sufficient to make or break the overall experience.
50% * $0 = $0
For more than a few years now, I’ve been fuming at the fact that US mobile carriers (Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, etc.) charge exorbitant fees to deliver mobile goods. Carriers take up to 50% of the purchase prices for ringtones, wallpapers, and other virtual goods that can be downloaded directly to your cellphone. (In fact, up until a couple of years ago, carriers insisted on taking 50% of the value of any donations made through a cellphone to a charity.)
This is madness.
A bevy of new mobile commerce startups are percolating up right now, but they all face the same problem: they must either build their own payment processing and transfer capabilities (essentially, become a bank), or utilize the carriers’ ability to charge purchases to customers’ cell phone bills.
Verizon’s CEO Ivan Seidenberg was on Charlie Rose last night, explaining how - now that they had built the bestest, fastest, whiz-bangiest network in the world - they wanted to reap the benefits by deploying more applications on their network that weren’t so “capital intensive.”
Translation: we own the pipe, and we’d like to take a piece of transaction that flows down it.
There are two impediments to this strategy:
- There are lots of other pipes which are just as fast and just as good
- You might like charging on a pay-per-use model, but no one likes paying that way.
Verizon (and most other carriers) would like mobile payment providers to keep forking over 1/2 of the value of all goods and services delivered on their network. And why not? It’s effectively free for Verizon to deliver 1MB of content, so why not take $1 for it? Why settle for $.25?
There are two reasons why a quarter makes a better business plan: first, the volume of goods and services that vendors and processors can afford to sell on a mobile platform explodes when the transaction costs approach zero. Second, given two delivery mechanisms that provide the same benefit (buy anything from anyone who has a mobile phone, anywhere), users will choose the easiest option.
That means a platform where I can text someone else a dollar amount from my mobile phone is going to get taken up more quickly than an app I need to download, install, and ensure that the recipient already has. (Nearly everyone can text. Amazingly, not everyone has an iPhone.)
If memory serves, there were something like $2 Billion in ringtones sold in the U.S. last year. GDP for the U.S. was about $14 Trillion. Which looks like the better target to you?
2 years ago • NotesFive Point Plan for a Perfect Mobile Marketing Solution
I don’t particularly like mobile couponing.
I don’t think offers broadcast via Bluetooth or WiFi or any other interruptive mechanism have much of a future.
And it seems particularly obvious to me that having to download an app in order to participate in a retailer’s “special offers” is a plan doomed to smallness (unless the retailer wants to give the phone away with the app installed.)
Instead, I think key to a ubiquitous, useful and successful mobile marketing solution (the kind that actually links mobile and mortar), needs to demonstrate these attributes:
- It must build on the mobile technologies that are most widely used today (that’s voice, and texting)
- It must be pulled by the user, not pushed by the marketer.
- It must be timely - which means presented at the right time, but also time-sensitive (i.e., it must expire quickly.)
- It must fit within the existing flow of a purchase cycle (and, by doing so, cannot interrupt any portion of that cycle)
- It must allow for the redemption of the offer without additional connective technology (this is really an expansion of #1, but different for some subtle reasons.)
To a lot of people, these are going to seem like obvious constraints. For others, they’re going to seem backward-looking and dismissive of more cutting edge mobile technologies. For the record, I’m envisioning a system where the “integration” of mobile marketing is as seamless and ubiquitous as the integration of paper or TV into marketing, but still allowing for the unique capabilities of the mobile platform (personalization, trackability, etc.)
Some justification is required, so here goes:
- Nearly everyone in the U.S. has a mobile phone, many people have more than one. All of them are capable of sending and receiving voice (“well, duh,” you might say, but this fact is often overlooked.) Most (90%)+ are capable of sending/receiving text messages. No other technology is as ubiquitous.
- Interruptive marketing is doomed to fail in the long run because the noise will always quickly drown out the signal. Even a subscription-based service where users opt in to receiving offers has to be judicious about how often messages get sent.
- Delivering offers when people are succeptible is important - and so long as you are delivering them on-demand, fairly easy. But if your goal is to activate your customer, the offer has to expire. Quickly. (If for no other reason than, with the opportunity missed, a customer will re-opt-in for another chance.)
- Interrupting the purchase cycle is always going to reduce the number of people who complete it. If you’re asking people to request information or opt-in for an offer, the response has to come back to them immediately… and you can’t be garaunteed that immediacy with any carrier network all the time.
- Screen-scanning registers and Bluetooth-enabled checkouts are great… but it will be a long time before they’re everywhere. A long time.
This is something of a work in progress, to be sure. I’m trying to center in on some core principles for mobile marketing, though.
2 years ago • NotesThe WITOIF syndrome
More than once I’ve had that feeling - an idea so dastardly simple and brilliant, I can’t help but feel ashamed that I hadn’t been able to connect the dots myself. And it’s even more amazing when, in this age when ideas spread instantly around the globe, you find that no one else has thought of it either.
I recently met with a potential client who wanted us to develop a new site for them. Over the phone we’d chatted about their existing business, and a new audience they wanted to reach out to with this offering. They already had many of the pieces they’d need to make it all work, but he wouldn’t share any details until we met in person.
It was vague and fascinating, and I can’t help in those situations but try to put the pieces together myself. I met with him the next day.
Within about 5 minutes of walking in the door, he had shared only the name of the website he wanted us to build - but everything had fallen into place. My head was bobbing up and down - “yes, yes, yes… this makes perfect sense. This is brilliant.”
And it still amazes me: no one is doing this already. And it’s not that no one else has the wherewithal or the pieces to make it happen, it’s just that no one is doing this. No one else has put the puzzle together yet.
Sadly, confidentiality prevents me from sharing any details, but trust me: it’s freakin’ brilliant. Mind you, it’s not going to change the world in any fundamental sense, but it is going to bug the hell out of a lot of people who could’ve thought of it first, but didn’t.
And I wish that I’d thought of it first.
2 years ago • NotesIf technology can’t do the job, try lawyers
Microsoft is suing click-fraudsters
While their counsel and others make the valid point that this is more about creating precedent for future legal action, the fact remains that Microsoft’s technological solution to this problem failed, and they’ve fallen back on legal action to “change the economics” of the confrontation.
Translation: it is cheaper and easier for them to sue than to solve the technical problem. And while that works just fine in terms of domestic defendants, it’s going to be much more difficult and expensive for them to find, let alone sue, more sophisticated fraudsters operating out of foreign locales.
The legal aspects of this are no less a cat-and-mouse game than the technological aspects are.
2 years ago • NotesHey, where’d you get $3 million bucks? I want $3 million bucks
Dell says it has earned $3 million from twitter
This shows, once again, that “social marketing” has as much to do with the traditional themes of awareness and activation that marketers have been coping with for decades.
Actually, it’s been this way for a few dozen centuries.
2 years ago • Notes