Archive for May, 2008
May 29, 2008
Call it a media hack or remix, but the blog French Laundry at Home is grabbing the attention of big media as the site’s visitor numbers rise exponentially in response to the innovative use of the original recipe book, French Laundry, by blog author Carol Blymire.
In effect, Blymire, an amateur cook at best, is attempting every recipe in the book, and blogging on both her succcesses and failures. French Laundry, by the way, is regarded as being a collection of the most technically complicated recipes available anywhere. Blymire’s attempt is akin to a bungy jumper taking on the challenge of a moon landing.
The blog represents how the remix of professionally produced content and IP by the end consumer has a market in itself, let alone extending the life-cycle of the original content, in this case book sales of French Laundry which have risen 30 to 40 percent in the last few months.
Conceptually, this remix process is about a brand decentalising control (unintentionally in this case) of both the elements of that brand, as well as to the content which contributes to the brand’s reputation to end users. However, this is a risk-reward formula that few directors are willing to contemplate.
Concurrently, Blymire is effectively positioning herself as one of the most important actors in modern marketing: the ‘influencer’. Blymire’s amateur status (read: integrity), combined with her cache as a foodie, provides food producers and their strategists with the option of using Blymire to endorse their product.
This in turn becomes the catalyst to ripple the message across a large cross-section of the digital food network.
Remix + engagement = eWOM
May 25, 2008
Unlike ‘old world’ media, an audience is no longer malleable to the medium - quiet the reverse.
Now, the medium or mediums, sway to the intricacies of a modern lifestyle, serving individuals when their attention allows.
A near perfect digital strategy, then, is built upon some very non-digital disciplines, like anthropology and ethnography, for example.
Using any number of digital platforms - mobile, online - at any particular point in time, the message strobes the market until the target group eventually receives the ‘coded’ message, or when they make a conscious decision to seek out relevant information. A good analogy is the radio spectrum. Particular messages are broadcast on particular frequencies, yet using a filter like a radio, the individual tunes in to the preferred message.
As the the digital media spectrum becomes ever more prevalent, channel selection becomes more paramount.
This positioning is perfectly relevant to old school media as well, with the caveat that their window of opportunity to score a direct hit on the intended audience is becoming ever narrower, particularly for an increasingly time-poor audience.
In its place is a widening canvass for digital platforms, particularly mobile. It is no coincidence that the ‘game space’ for engaging an increasing number of people, regardless of time and space, is the sweet spot for smart phone technology, particularly with the weakining of the Internet’s game space post ‘early fringe’ (3pm onwards).
In the context of ethnographic studies, each media must be mapped as to the influence at each time of the day. This so-called ‘game space’ is applicable to each media, either in isolation or more commonly, concurrently with several other media options.
It is critical for channel strategies to identify these media influences are identified and utilised from the perspective of creative development, as well as the usual reach and frequency analysis.
One final point. Each DNA segment will have their own ‘game space’, suggesting that the influence of the Internet, for example, will differ across a 24-hour time period for segment DNA 1 to its influence on segment DNA 3. What a creative time we live in!
May 22, 2008
The VM Index slipped by just under 1% over the past week, closing at 762.54.
Based on these latest numbers, this bring the value of our stock portfolio to $9,974, down from its original value of $13,080. Baring any merger and acquisition speculation in media circles, the resources sector will continue to draw investor dollars away from discretionaries over the forseeable future.
In the past week, strong upward swings were recorded by Austereo (AEO) up almost 10%, followed by Fairfax (FXJ) up 6.2%, Macquarie Media Group (MMG) up 5% and realestate.com.au (REA) up 3.9%.
Stocks which suffered signficant declines in price included PMP down 22%, Austar (AUN) down 6.3% and Crown (CWN) down 3.9%.
May 20, 2008
Now it’s getting serious. Up to now, the only thing standing between a new found artist and fortune was the marketing savvy of the major labels. Their dollars and industry networks have greased the wheels of radio playlists for decades. But what if the power of ‘crowd sourcing’ or social production, which is already powering the operations of Google, YouTube and CraigList, could be harnessed to drive the fortunes of music artists?
The BBC’s SoundIndex (currently in Beta) is one step towards demonstrating how network power can determine winners in the fickled music space. Similar to the network power of a Digg platform (without the proactive tags), SoundIndex effectively monitors the online “buzz” (e-Word of Mouth) around artists and music tracks by spidering links, terms, conversations, comments and the like.
Partners involved include Google Groups, Bebo, Last.FM, YouTube and iTunes. As an aggregator of public taste, rather than as an arbiter, SoundIndex is well placed to signficantly impact the buyer’s decision by circumventing the millions spent by labels on marketing their pool of artists. It’s about ‘mob intelligence’ impacting the decision of potential buyers to purchase immediately, or at the very least, move them along the sales cycle and closer to an actual purchase decision.
As with most new media plays, the brains behind the build are technology plays. In this case it is IBM and its Almaden Research Center. Using Semantic Super Computing, the Index lists the top 1,000 mentions collated from more than 17.8 million comments, plays, posts and views. The list s updated every six hours.
May 18, 2008
Last month alone, up to 59m Americans were exposed to at least one advertising message on their mobile phone according to research by Nielsen. Further, most of those recipients did not have a negative attitude towards this type of ‘intrusion’, despite the majority of messages delivered via Bluetooth.
There is a point in markets like the US and the UK now being reached at which there is a very strong need for a robust mobile analytics platform. Not only in terms of providing market aggregates, like growth rates and ad exposures, but increasingly by campaign and site performance as well.
However, the need to provide this data is arguably more urgent in the case of mobile, vis a vis the desktop Internet. The perceived higher risks associated with mobile, whether in terms of the user experience, the technical set-up or campaign performance, requires that there is a comparable level of measurement to validate the decision in the first place. For the most part, that measurement or post-campaign analysis is simply not forthcoming. Hence, the often false starts associated with mobile-mania.
The debate about mobile analytics is currently dominated by the likes of Nielsen and M:Metrics with their sample methodologies (essentially panels of mobile users), however, like desktop research, sample methodology is limited by its granularity, particularly around site activity.
In fact most desktop analytic methodologies have holes like Swiss cheese when it comes to their applicability to the mobile Internet. Further, when it comes to reporting performance across platforms, we’re asking for a whole world of trouble.
For example, Javascript which supports many desktop analytic applications like Google, isn’t supported very well by handsets - in fact less then 1% of handsets support Javascript. The code is also a significant burden to the page’s file size, affecting the user experience. Likewise, cookies are also an issue, either because the mobile browser doesn’t support them or won’t accept them.
A strong alternative now being developed and tested by several commercial groups is the use of specific user IDs for each visitor to a mobile site or link. The IDs are built into ‘redirects’ to the vendors servers, which then pass the user back to the intended destination. This would be applicable to search terms, 3rd party links, advertising links or if the user simply browsed the site.
The IDs then sync with links to the home pages, landing pages and then through the entire click stream through to downloads, forms etc. This is where the ‘rubber meets the road’ in the all important ROI analysis into mobile investments. Critically, the curret methodologies which dominate the mobile space cannot deliver this data with much integrity, hence the urgency to get this right in Australia when the tipping point in mobile activity, currently underway in Europe, reaches our shores.
May 16, 2008
A strong motivator behind the IAB’s decision to appoint a professional executive is the enormous pressure felt by all publishers (at least those on the board) to ramp up display advertising revenues. The IAB wants a salesperson to spruik the performance advantages of the Internet over other media.
The relative decline in the growth of display revenues (against search and even classifieds) indicates why there is an urgency to prove why online display works. Rapid progress needs to be made in terms of building case studies and market evidence, or proof points, around the effectiveness of behavioural targeting technology. These issues are front and centre of the new CEO’s remit.
The perennial issue underlining all this is the quandry faced by publishers as to what proportion of their inventory is siphoned off to a third-party for rates which might be a few points ahead of the typical run-of-site rates given to a publisher directly. In other words, what is remnant and what is premium, or what proportion of pages should be sold by the in-house sales team?
The problem for most publishers, and the market generally, is that there isn’t enough premium inventory, or more specifically, quality content. This imbalance between premium and remnant pages is being exacerbated by the plethora of social networking sites. In fact, the market, particularly in the US, is so awash with remnant or poor quality pages, that eCPMs continue to be driven downwards to levels some argue are unsustainable even for ad network operators.
One of the US’s largest ad networks, PubMatic, has indicated that eCPM rates for a host of publishing sites are heading southward, some by very hefty margins.
Large web sites (>100m page views per month) have seen rates decline from 0.33 cents in February to 0.18 cents in April. This category includes that major social networking sites, which alone represent a 47% decline in the three month period, from 0.39 cents to 0.19 cents eCPM.
On the other hand, smaller niche sites have experienced an average rate rise of almost 15 cents, from $1.15 eCPM to $1.29 eCPM. In the case of small sites, ad networks are adding extraordinary value to the sales process because they improve the site’s eCPM rates while ensuring the site is not burdened with an expensive sales force of its own.
Other categories within the large website category to face rate declines include ‘entertainment’ down 17%, ‘gaming’ down 4% and ’sports’ down 5%. ‘Technology’ was fairly steady, with the eCPM rate shifting marginally from 83 cents to 82 cents.
Overall, the trend is a weakness in the monetisation of remnant inventory; a result of a substantial rise in the page impressions generated by social networks. The question that needs to asked here in Australia is what impact the localisation of such sites as Bebo and MySpace will have on remnant prices? Will they in fact further weigh down the growth rates for display advertising generally, and if so, how does a publisher like News Digital Media reconcile this conflict between the need to boost the local popularity of a global brand like MySpace (and in the process pump out huge quantities of page impressions) with its obvious requirement to maximise display revenues across the group by bolstering premium rates?
May 11, 2008
The recent decision by PBL Media to ‘experiment’ with P2P file sharing using the Canal Road creation as ‘bait’ has struck many as rather perculiar.
That the Nine Network decided to cancel the series just three weeks into its run, reinforces the oddness of the decision to use the program at the forefront of efforts to understand the implications for braodcasters of “positive DRM”.
Just to recap: PBL Media chose to freely distribute Canal Road online, concurrently with its free-to-air broadcast schedule, effectively allowing entire episodes to be freely downloaded and distributed through P2P platforms such as BitTorrent. The catch was to encode the episodes using Hiro technology. This allowed unbridled file distribution, but actively inserted advertisements into the program regardless of when and where the file was shared. The advertisements cannot be cut out or fast forwarded.
Hiro is a well credentialled P2P distribution platform, with trials already underway with several US broadcasters. Essentially a software codec, the technology provides real-time ad serving with admin rights such as geo-locking, age verification and time limited release.
All credit to PBL Media for seizing the initiative on this front, especially given the near infatuation Australians have with P2P downloads. In the most recent Cybercrime Eurovisual Study (2007), the AU domain represents just 1% of the world’s Internet IP traffic, yet makes up more than 20% of all bit torrent traffic. That’s what you call punching above your weight!
However, it remains the choice of material which did most to undermine any opportunity this decision had to assess P2P behaviour in Australia. In short, the vast majority of P2P practitioners are not at all interested in a genre like Canal Road, which has more of a daytime soap audience appeal than a hardcore, ‘must have’ TV drama series like a 24 (in the early days), Battlestar Galactica, Carnivale or, much to Nine’s chagrine, Underbelly.
As the recent Vector Media Study indicated (online survey: 1,500), the vast bulk of the filesharing community is male, aged between 15 and 34, while a small outlier exists amongst females aged between 20 and 24. In short, the classic profile of a P2P user is a ‘first adopter’/'early adopter’, or more accurately, a person with a high to very high DNA score.
Like it or not, PBL’s Underbelly is by far the preferred content fodder for the local P2P community. And with the blessing of PBL and the Victorian Supreme Court, a decision to use the crime series as a Hiro test-case might just have made Australian P2P history.
May 9, 2008
While arguably not setting the fashion world on fire with unique fashion statements, the Australian Fashion Week did push the boundaries of conventionality by utilising ‘influencers’ to promote the week, and more importantly seed entire communities with a buzz about labels, up-and-coming designers and celebrity titbits.
These ‘influencers’ included at least five locally-based bloggers who are in the fortunate position to have their own ’slaves to fashion’ pressing for their latest catwalk critique. Courted and given media-style access by the event’s organisers, these bloggers were duly impressed and wrote accordingly.
This is a fine example of electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM), and its impact on an entire network (and most probably mainstream media) when one particular node, or influencer, is seeded with appropriate information.
In this instance, organisers have targeted particular content developers, not for a glorified advertorial snowjob, but simply to reach hardcore followers of the fashion czars. Their targeting was exquisite, while the medium is purely conversational, producing a far more dynamic, informed and educated energy to the event.
For any organisation or business claiming a customer or client base strewn with high scoring DNA types, the economics of targeting ‘influencers’ amongst them is highly justified and a very competitive method of building share-of-voice/mind.
May 8, 2008
The VM Index closed up 1.25% this week to 767.58, representing a cooling off period for the index as stockholders re-evaluate market signals about the immediate and medium-term softness of the overall ad space, but more specifically the television and print markets. News Corp says the local market is booming (from their perspective) while media buyers generally play a much more downbeat tune.
The ledger was fairly balanced across the portfolio in terms of positive and negative gains.
Strong performers included Austar (AUN) +2.3%, WAN +2.1%, Mitchell’s +7.7, News Corp (NWS) +5.9% and Seek (SEK) up an impressive 12.2%, though ultimately making up for ground lost over the last couple of weeks.
Stocks which lost significant weight included Macquarie Communications Group (MCG) -9.2%, Austereo (AEO) -8.3% and Wotif (WTF) down 7.9%. Others to shed kilos rather tonnes, included Fairfax (FXJ) -2.9% and Seven (SEV) -3.4%.
To put the index’s performance into a more tangible construct, consider that at the start of the year $13,080 was invested in purchasing 100 shares in each stock listed in the index. As of this week, that same portfolio is valued at closer to $10,040.
May 7, 2008
In an effort to build customer engagement and association, the music industry, of all industries, has an almost duty of care to throw out past thinking on customer profiling and rebuild customer segmentation models around new thinking and new attitudes about a customer’s propensity to buy or experience music in a digital format.
No more demographics, so more psychographics, no more postcodes - think technology, or more specifically, the ’scoring’ of a customer based on their digital sophistication or familiarity with digital tools, like blogs, RSS, MP3, wikis, widgets and applications. These technologies supercede age and gender, and none more so than in markets associated with the music and performing arts industries.
Music content is simply more malleable, more portable than most other content types, owing to manageable file sizes accessible across multiple devices. This in turn produces a type of virtuous circle, where greater, more convenient usage simply begets more interest in the medium. Entire commutes, for example, whether in the train or car, can be programmed to an individual’s ’soundtrack’.
In short, our personal music repertoires are growing exponentially as we consume more music, more often.
This pervasiveness lends itself to a type of behavioural or device segmentation, rather than the usual customer parameters. Current attempts to devise customer segmentation around definitions such as “first adapter” or “majority adaptor” are relatively crude methods of fusing technology ’saviness’ with age bands.
A male aged between 15 and 19, for example, is significantly more likely to be classified as a “first adaptor” than the market average, where as a female aged between 45 and 54 is signficantly less likely to be classified as “early adoptors” compared with the market average.
An alternative segmentation strategy is the development of Digital Network Awareness (DNA) score which can be applied to each customer, effectively defining them by their preferred communications or device technologies. For example, some will prefer email, while will be very familar (and comfortable) with bluetooth, streaming or the humble USB key.
In this data sample (source: Victrix Media), the design of a music subscription service first needs to evaluate the preferred devices of the target audience. In this context, bluetooth, streaming (via social media site) and podcasts lead the pack in terms of a preferred user experience.
In any market where there is a high concentration of digital assets, customer or audience DNA scores should, at the very least, complement existing methdologies to ensure more relevant segmentation modelling.
