Digital developments . . . .

Addressable advertising has hit the news again.   The launch of BSkyB’s AdSmart service around their on-demand service Sky Player will provide the blueprint for integration on its satellite platform next year.   It marks the debut of a mass-market targeted substitutional advertising (TSA) model on linear TV in the UK.   It's aim?   To deliver more relevant messages to TV viewers plus the accountability and personalisation common to digital media, enabling TV ads being tailored to specific households, even individuals.  

That said, addressable TV advertising will take time to build up to a meaningful critical mass.   It certainly has the potential to bring new revenues into TV, an industry desperate to revive its ailing fortunes.   As ever, media agencies will need to build up their understanding of the technology . . . and frankly with many still struggling to grasp digital, it may take some time!   TV measurement needs to shift from outputs to outcomes in orer to match the sophisticated targeting and accountability of online - there is a long way to go yet.

Spotify is in the news again with reports that Lady GaGa earned a paltry $167 from Spotify's million plus streams of her hit Poker Face.   Whoops!   Below is a graphical representation of what music creatives earn from the various distribution methods (click image to see it larger).

Google’s UK earnings have reached yet another record high of $842 million between January and March 2010.   This equates to a nine percent rise from the last Quarter of 2009 and 15 percent from the same period a year ago.   Google execs were delighted with this on the recent analyst's call.

The Hut Group, which rescued Zavvi.co.uk last year, is making a £14 million ($21.7 million) investment for acquisition prior to a float on the stock market. This is the first major digital flotation we've seen in the UK for many years and indicates that there is life in digital yet . . . . it's not all about the ads or paywalls.

The Hut powers the online retailing of physical goods on a white-label basis for diverse clients including WH Smith, Tesco.com, Lovefilm and Argos and also operates its own fulfillment service and own-brand digital retailer, theHut.com.

An interesting example of how social media can create awareness and foster green themed developments came by recently.   Myoo is a community for environmental and social innovation and brngs to the fore creative solutions to environmental challenges.   It's a far cry from making chairs out of old coke bottles!

Apple are delaying the launch of the iPad outside the USA . . . . where they have, incidentally experienced massive problems with meeting demand.   In the meantime here in the UK, digital publishers have been falling over themselves to show off apps designed for the iPad.   Bizarrely, the Daily Express are in the vanguard!

That's all for now, more later.   But before I go, if you want a free subscription to Marketing Week delivered to your door sign up here - don't say I don't give you anything!

Paywalls: It's payback time

It's payback time for consumers of free online newspaper content as the paywalls come down.  

LexisNexis - once thought to be the one stop shop for news aggregation and search - has begun sending out letters warning of the withdrawal of some of its titles. Guess which ones?

The Times newspapers announced that the paywalls would come down in June.   The long march away from free content starts now.   Mr Murdoch's appearance at the National Press Club (in the USA) saw him argue that people would pay when there was nowhere else left to go.   No, he's not going mad.   But it does underline my earlier thesis that he views the BBC (and Google) as competition.   Why?

The answer is this.   If you are building a system of paywalls you will obviously lose ad revenue.   The BBC can't benefit from ad revenue as it cannot carry advertisements but it may well benefit from an audience uplift to it's network of (very good) websites.   So, what can Mr Murdoch do?  

Ranting aside, Murdoch can recast his newspaper empire as an adjunct to his broadcast/film interests.   In this way he can create a synergetic cross-media whole from what currently seems a disparate grouping of media entities.   Then, fasten the bonds with a 'club' of some sort (Times+) where you get free tickets or reduced subscriptions to other Murdoch owned or sponsored initiatives . . . .

What you now have is a self-sustaining model predicated less on expensive consumer acquisition and more on customer retention (cheaper and more profitable in the long run).   It's the oldest and simplest rule of marketing.   In this way Murdoch can manage the decline in ad revenues from the print editions, which the uplift in online ad revenues has in no way plugged I might add, and thus stem the flow of cusomers away from his products.   Finally, he can upsell advertisements across platforms in a way that the BBC cannot commercially (though it does effectively with it's content).   Oh - and of course his customes are paying customers so are also likely be seen as more attractive by advertisers.

One big problem.   Few, if any, of Murdoch's competitors in the UK show any sign of going down either the paywall route or withdrawing their content from Google and other search engines.   The BBC is also very much alive.   There is little or no proof that audiences will pay for conent they think they can get free elsewhere.

The painful truth may well turn out to be as Thomas Jefferson put it:

"I read no newspaper now but Ritchie's, and in that chiefly the advertisements, for they contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper."


Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Nathaniel Macon, January 12, 1819

With the plethora of news and comment available to us, do we really need newspapers as we once did?   Is a managed decline actually the only way forward?   Has Mr Murdoch in fact hit on a way of managing that decline as profitably as he can within a short timeframe?   I think he might have.

Social Media Marketing - A simple guide

Social media marketing is earning a role in the integrated marketing mix, kind of. As a practitioner I know that social media marketing - SMM for short - is transforming every business division from the inside out. I'm less convinced that brands operating in hierarchical set-ups are getting the message.

Here in the UK a recent survey by Major Players concluded that organisations and marketers need to get a grip on the ins and outs of social media – fast.


Innovate and evolve

This is a recurring theme. Many businesses jump into Social Media without crafting a strategic plan rooted in goals, objectives, KPIs or an understanding of best-practice models. Questions like 'what will be the likely impact of engagement on the brand / organisations?' are rarely asked, let alone understood by senior personnel or the social practitioners and advocates involved. Social media is too often placed in a silo called 'digital marketing', as though it were a discrete part of the business with no relationship to actual processes, actions and reactions elsewhere. Big mistake!

So – here is a view of just some of the opportunities available, and to be avoided, when using the social Web. I'll refine and update these as I go along. . .

Create a survey of fans
Surveys are an effective way to garner feedback to continue to earn ongoing relevance to your existing and new customers. Surveys can range from satisfaction levels, behaviour around the prospect or act of referrals, votes towards new policies and services or be used purely for entertainment. At the simplest level, surveys inject variety into the Facebook stream to foster new opportunities for engagement and communication.

“Friend” recent customers with your corporate profile
Strictly speaking, this activity goes against Facebook’s Terms of Service so go carefully. Facebook periodically flags and deletes branded profile accounts as they’re discovered. Twitter is more open to this approach.

Use Facebook/Twitter user data to profile customers
Social media is nothing if not an experiment. Along the way it provides enormously useful insights into your users' psychography (their interests, passions and motivations – cause based connections for example). Examine your social graph to gain an insight into possible initiatives and trends.

Create a Facebook app around the brand
As the old adage has it – 'yup, there's an app for that', in fact there are often too many. Their lack of utility or longevity springs from their usually being, well, useless. Facebook apps are not guaranteed to earn an audience simply because they’re created. Users' adoption of new apps are related to their friends' activity rather than an allegiance to a particular brand. Make an app relevant, stimulating and ideally 'issue' or 'entertainment' based and you'll likely be on to something – it's that pesky psychograhy again!

Driving traffic to corporate materials through status updates
Where are you sending your users? Chances are your users are landing on a message-rich, yet lifeless and generic web page or company home page. So, you are using a highly interactive and social environment to drive traffic to a static dead-end. Hmmm, not good. Consider linking to issue / campaign specific pages and ideally captivating, interactive or viral content.

Buying targeted CPC ads
Targeted CPC (cost-per-click) ads on Facebook are only as effective as the intention and experience to which they’re tied (see above). Many businesses use these ads to increase the number of fans on a fan page or to promote corporate material. I would suggest using them to drive traffic to clearly pre-defined experiences. However, do bear in mind that buying ads is perhaps the least effective element of the mix.

Monitor Twitter/Facebook and other social media for PR problems in real-time
A PR problem can materialise at any moment, with little warning. Monitoring what your customers are saying about your brand (and to whom) enables you to be proactive in addressing the reported problems internally, in tandem with an external 'push' to correct the . . . . misapprehension. There are myriad free tools to help you monitor what is being said about your brand - Technorati, Blog Pulse, Google Trends and Alerts, Omgili, Tweetcloud and Tweetbeep . . . . . and way more besides.

Contact Twitter users tweeting negatively about the brand
As users venture into using social media in ever-greater numbers, so they are also learning that social media, like Twitter especially, can act as an echo-chamber for complaints and suggestions to brands. Brands that monitor this space are more likely to respond. OK, it could be argued that this encourages users to complain in a public forum. What would you rather? That they complained to you and your processes ignored the complaint or mis-handled it? Or are you assuming that no-one complains about your brand and services? Think again.

Contacting users tweeting negatively about your brand is a tactic shared between PR and customer service and requires solid work flow processes tied to it. It’s very easy to confuse who should respond to which tweets and who already did, versus which tweets require response.

Create 'events'
Too often I've seen people confine themselves to Twitter alone, or just Facebook, without considering using both in addition to LinkedIn and myriad other social options such as surveys and email invites to create buzz around an event. Not only does this provided great user feedback and engagement, it can help guide the tone and style of your event as well.

Provocative text drives clicks
Interesting. As the saying goes, “Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.” To earn attention nowadays requires a level of creativity that mirrors the methodologies of creative advertising and marketing fused with the grounding of strategic communications. Pay attention to planning and editorial programming to ensure relevance and appeal. Avoid the merely sensational or 'trending' as users will see through that pretty quickly.

Invite Twitter users who tweet positively about a brand to do . . .
Consider using positive tweets as the basis for an advocacy or official ambassador program. As this tactic becomes ubiquitous, consumers are getting wise to their power in social media. Consumers expect something for their loyalty. Consider this prior to engaging.

Time Tweets to maximise views
There is an art and science to what we tweet and when. When using social media think like a media programmer. Content, timing and promotional style will dictate the size of the audience and their expectations. For example Monday and Friday are a great time to Tweet. In the UK, the morning slot from around 7am to noon is perfect for local/territory based messaging.

Real time search: Implications

Google's real time search feature has big implications for brand reputation, SEO and paid search. What are they?

I'll start by looking at Social Media, PPC and SEO techniques.


Social Media
Real time search puts brand reputation to the fore. Why?

Look at it this way, I criticise a brand and that post on Twitter say features as a top search in real time . . . . . get it?

Real time search puts social media at the heart of search like never before. Brands that have not engaged will lose out by failing to engage with the slipstream of the fastest moving economic and commercial revoution of all-time. Brands that have engaged will have to invest more in online reputation management resources. For a while I was managing just such a project internally and it was a full time activity, I mean 24/7.

Customers searching for a brand will see everything, EVERYTHING, and immediately . . . or as quickly as I can post that poor review of the dodgy restaurant I was at.

It really is that simple.


PPC
I was managing this in-house for a time. It was hugely time-consuming and quite costly. This isn't to write off PPC.

For the right product or service and correctly managed (ideally by an agency or fully resourced in-house team!) PPC can work brilliantly. Why does real time search impinge on PPC then?

Most PPC systems scan search engines a few times a day, not in real time. So, whilst the position of your PPC ad may not change, the commentary around it will and this has huge implications for click through rates, costs and of course, revenues.

PPC is Google's golden calf. It is unlikely that it is about to be slaughtered. However, the way that real time search scrolls and updates does affect the way you look at a page . . . . .


SEO and how we do it . . . .
Or, will retweets become the new links? As SEO practioners we spend our time making sure we publish relevant links in natural results returned for your search. Real time search results will push organic search results (SERPs) lower down the page . . . . hmmmm.

It' not all bad news though. For any opportunist or challenger brands with great content, and there are many, it's a real opportunity to use trending keywords and real time search to great advantage.

However, the central conundrum remains. Imagine a page full of negative real time results, these will affect click through rates and links to a brand's portal and so it's natural SERPs position.

To be fair, Google are using filtering and authority (to some extent) with real time search so the picture may not be too bleak.

I shall update as I go along . . . .