Archive for August, 2009
August 12, 2009
In the context of marketing and sales, the concept of ‘engagement’ carries increasing gravitas, and yet is still difficult to conceptualise through a single definition. Quantifying the blighter is harder still. The fascination with engagement stems from its potential to make-up for any shortfall in customer contact a brand may have in the areas of reach and frequency. What a brand fails to achieve in market share or regularity of contact (or feedback), the brand might compensate through share-of-mind. In the case of mobile phones, market share (unit sales) is dominated by the likes of Nokia and Samsung, with Blackberry and iPhone well behind. The put the quantity of sales into perspective, Samsung Australia sells approximately 3m units a year (second only to Nokia), compared with the 400,000 iPhones currently in operation in Australia (just under 4% of the market). Yet, in terms of digital chatter, comprising opinion, advice, questions and general consumer feedback, there is a massive discrepancy between brands, this time favouring Apple and Blackberry handsets. In short, what these brands lack in market share, they more than compensate for in terms of communities openly engaging in a dialogue, sometimes quiet passionately, about a mass-produced consumer item. The Sentiment Index graph below illustrates the scale of digital chatter between brands, with the iPhone alone having a 10-to-1 advantage against most competiting brands. By quantifying engagement in this manner, does this incentivise brand managers to do the cost-benefit of investing in an engagement strategy ahead of traditional reach and frequency filters? 
Source: Victrix Media
August 10, 2009
There is something very un-News Corp about this global steering committee to oversee, or to at least recommend, next steps towards the commercialisation of content. Where once the Sun King provided the autocratic guidance, now a coterie of editorial managers across the globe are collaborating in a workshop initiative. The company’s about-face on the preferred commercial model almost certainly started with the acquisition of the WSJ. The publication’s insistence on a pay-per-view model, and its general success as a proof-point, provided the content leviathan with some Dutch courage to publicly castigate Google and its parasitic ways. It certainly wasn’t the first shot fired in anger at the algorithm with a copyright blind-spot, but it was a particularly conspicuous comment to make. So while News Corp locks itself up behind the door marked “Special Projects, Scenario Planning”, the latest music whiz kid, Spotify, with its elegant UI and unfaltering streaming technology, makes the simple point to customers: mediocrity is free (160Kbps), while quality (320 Kbps) will cost. Likewise, it’s time for News Corp, or that other renowned first-mover, Fairfax Digital, to swallow the courage cookie, take a deep breath, and politely remind Google and every other freeloader of the same dictum. 
August 10, 2009
The clean, crisp lines demarcating the radio stations we listen to, or the television programs we watch on free-to-air, tend to blur and mutate the more our media behaviour migrates online. In other words, taking a screeching left off the autobahn, the viewer becomes immersed in a very dynamic, less predictable media-experience.
What compounds the issue of unpredictability, and at times confusion, is the lack of comprehensive data on comparative behaviour across websites. In other words, online media consumption is still overwhelmingly assessed by singular points of ‘engagement’ rather than in the context of the person’s repertoire of online publications and applications.
In the context of online music audiences, the plethora of music-related websites makes the measurement and understanding of engagement even more acute.
In Australia, our understanding, let alone analysis, of these online eco-systems, or repertoires, is very limited, despite having evolved through a combination of habit, relevancy and external promotion. We know, for example, that just over 390,000 Australians visit The Pirate Bay in a single month, and that about 226,000 will visit the Take40 website, but in the context of an online entertainment category with a reach of 9.4m Australians (source: Nielsen Online), where individuals spend on average three hours a month in the category, are these audience figures respectable, impressive or positively underwhelming?
Each month, Australians visit more than 450 entertainment-type websites, and this ignores the plethora of social media, sports and news sites which tend to leverage the entertainment dollar. Given this level of fragmentation, a monthly audience of almost a quarter of million visitors seems more than respectable.
In the US, understanding media relativities in a digital context is clearly more mature than what we commonly experience in Australia. A quick snapshot of Pandora listeners aged between 18 and 34, for example, throws up some fascinating site affinities.
While shared audiences between Last.fm, Radio Time, emusic and Limewire seem self-evident, there are also some strong audience relationships with the likes of Music of Faith, All Gospel Lyrics and the entertainment sites, Bet.com, VH1 and Hulu (Source: Quantcast).
For MTV.com viewers, again aged between 18 and 34, the online repertoire is a little more secular. Sites like Bossip, Skyrock, Atlantic Records, Perez Hilton and NY Mag are all regarded as having some of the highest affinity scores with the cable group’s online viewers.
Locally, the situation is made more complicated by the regular ‘leakage’ of many Australian music consumers to a number of high profile international sites. Perez Hilton pulls in approximately 320,000 local visitors each month, compared with 215,000 for the Huffington Post, and the 3.6m Australians who switch onto the emerging social media giant RockYou each month.
Understanding online music consumption, let alone the potential adoption of music-related applications and technologies, is near ineffectual without better understanding the market’s overall immersion in entertainment content and the predominantly international brands that have secured local engagement on a frequent basis.
August 1, 2009
With news of Kazaa ‘back from the dead’ and the Pirate Bay now a little more mercenary (how long before the name changes to Tariff Bay?), the world of music downloads has lost a few of its high profile superstars to perhaps a misguided strategy that file-sharers will change their spots when cash-for-content becomes the mantra.
Yet despite the best intentions to swing heavy music consumers towards a ‘all-you-can-eat’ subscription model, the world of P2P goes on, swallowing terabytes of data every hour like a deep space vortex, distributing ‘leaks’ at near light speed. Faced with such gravitational pull (and distribution efficiencies), an uneasy truce seems to have descended between parties in these so-called copyright wars.
While legal machinations seem to be giving way to technical monitoring options, there is a measurable rise in deliberate marketing tactics designed to take the sting out of ‘leaks’ through the seeding of free sample tracks, either directly into social media communities or via an established media partner.
Whether you conform to the ‘music is water’ theory, or uphold a solid, unerring position on copyright, the reality of local P2P music download activity holds a simple objective truth: it is pervasive, and involves the vast majority of consumers who regularly attend live music performances, or take an active interest in maintaining a music library of sorts. New, or rehashed payment models bolted onto P2P ‘brands’ will not alter this behaviour in any material way.
Right now almost 78m music tracks are downloaded across Australia each week, with the top track alone, usually a mainstream, high-rotation artist (Black Eyed Peas, for example), recording more than 500,000 downloads on a consistent basis, while a local hip hop group, like Hilltop Hoods (Chase That Feeling), which again has the backing of local radio, might record up to 188,000 downloads. By comparison, an indie group like British India (God is Dead, Meet the Kids), with a much lower rotation, records just over 9,000 downloads.
Of course, the correlation between airplay and downloads is not that clear cut., or even that strong.
Black Eyed Peas (Boom Boom Pow), for example, records 571,687 downloads concurrently with 271 spins for the week, which equates to 2,109 downloads per spin. By comparison, Taylor Swift (Love Story) reports 422,780 downloads concurrent with just 18 spins, or 23,487 downloads per spin.
Other artists with high download rates but low spins include: Chris Brown (Forever), 267,982 downloads with five spins; Rihana (Disturbia), 283,557 downloads with seven spins and Dizee Rascal (Dance With Me), 137,585 downloads with just five spins.
Clearly, with so much data on local P2P activity now coming to light, there is still much more to understand about what the download market can define in terms of niche music tastes and what insights they provide to justify this type of analysis becoming an accurate barometer to music trends and, more importantly, emerging stars.
August 1, 2009
Recently, a rather old-fashioned word crept into our popular vocabulary - “narrative”. The thematic qualities of this term resemble a story’s ‘arc’ or the more sinister ‘sub-text’.
Whatever the moniker, this broader, almost minimalist approach to identifying what actuality matters in the ‘scheme of things’ is both a waste saver and a potential red light to crowds powered by the sheep mentality.
In the language of the dismal science, a macro-trend is just such an arc. Standing back, absorbing this vista means taking in a new perspective, and perhaps a new conclusion.
Such an approach has a habit of making the otherwise absurd, obtuse and the downright ambiguous as clear as crystal.
Take for example the synopsis that, for at the least next 50 years, Australia will never suffer a recession, a slow-down perhaps, but never two quarters of negative growth.
This brash, binary call isn’t presumptive at all. Taking your eyes off the next pothole, and back onto the horizon, you realise Asia’s middle class isn’t yet, relatively speaking, a mass market; that’s still a century into the future.
In the meantime, Australia’s minerals, agricultural produce and intellectual property will be sucked northwards like a twister in the sky, fuelling smelters, stomachs and minds.
A macro-trend of that magnitude won’t be diverted, or distracted, by a case of broker embezzlement, Chicken flu or even the next Al Qaeda suitcase bomb.
Ergo, Australia is recession-proof for the next half century.
Another macro trend relates to the long-term consequences of a networked world and the digitisation of assets, particularly intellectual property.
Social media in all its clever and hard-to-monetise guises, is its own type of macro trend. Like the ‘golden rule’ that economic growth requires the consumption of commodities, the ‘rule’ of social media is that the more people broadcast their lives, the more self-aware they become of the ‘content’ of their routines, including the experiences and memories that punctuate their days.
Put plainly, the larger and more active our digital networks become, the more we need to entertain these ‘audiences’ with worthy anecdotes and clever impressions.
Social networks are not sustained by the mundane, the average or ‘middle of the road’, they glow white hot with what we can muster that is ‘jagged and shiny’.
From this point onwards, the macro trend we call social media takes on a new persona – a mass audience and mass market for the unique, the tangible, and the experiential that cannot be replicated by processing lines of code.
Importantly, this shift is not based on the division of wealth, where the less well off are subjected to a commoditised, homogenised existence. On the contrary, the attribute of wealth is in fact neutered by the intellectual and creative elements that increasingly dictate terms. The artisan, the scientist, the explorer – these are the new rule makers. They personify a new aesthetic, largely detached from the materialism that has characterised the ‘acquisitor age’ (Ravi Batra).
It is this aesthetic that now ignites a more authentic introspection on the part of so many more individuals; indeed, a more widespread perspective on what contributes to happiness and wellbeing.
This search for quality, uniqueness and beauty is nothing new, only the scale of the phenomenon has altered; a scale made possible by the diffusion of network technology and our desire to broadcast ourselves committing to new experiences and a re-weighting of particular values.
The trajectory of this macro trend, or social arc, is unstoppable. Being on the cusp of this mass movement, where an increasing number of individuals now put their lives, their decisions and their associations into perspective, means institutions likewise must now recast their own assumptions about consumer motivations and political relations.
