I suppose this is news, that Apple launched its iPhone, yesterday. For months, or maybe years, this had been predicted. The patent was filed last year. As expected (since the Rokr) it’s the iTunes delivery/storage system. About the price of two smart phones, it has low battery life, but oozes with the cool factor.
These days, anything held up by Mr. black turtleneck, against the slightly out-of-focus logo, has instant coolness bestowed upon it by the media.
Today’s article in the NYT, defines a phenomenon of marketing that will probably be emulated everywhere on different scales. It’s about cameras in Times Square, being the ultimating ‘publishing’ platform. Make that the Marketing platform, when you consider the user-initiated, user-generated effect cameras and camera-phones are having.
I recently participated in he Samsung Blu-ray campaign, sending a text message to a billboard a few hundred feet away. In a few seconds, my phone received a response, and a code with which I could send a message to be displayed on the digital sign.
But it is more than placed-based marketing. These user-involved campaigns then get transmitted to other online venues such as YouTube, or shared by people on the P2P (which now also means phone-to-phone) network.
Someday we won’t have to visit Times Square of Picadilly circus to experience in and participate in what goes on there, whether it is a stupid trick by David Blane for Target, or vote on important issues, or post a picture via Reuter’s.
This news has to make TV execs perk up. CBS experimented with posting more than 300 clips from its Late Show (Letterman) and the Early Show on YouTube, and got over 29 million views in about a month. More importantly, that has translated into about 200,000 new viewers tuning in to the TV programs on Letterman –you know the old ‘appointment TV.’
One more proof-point that new media doesn’t need to replace old media –just supplement and enhance it.
The future of TV is being discussed by Arizona Republic columnist, Bill Goodykoontz, media analyst and TV critic. There is the usual "new technologies don’t supplant old technologies’ idea In theory, I support this, because it explains why we don’t choose TV or the Web (for video) mobile phones or the internet (for phone calls), DVRs or YouTube etc.
Are we then really discussing the YouTube effect? Or the TiVo effect? Not just video on demand, but time-shifting, alternative media delivery, and –what doesn’t get discussed much– people’s attention spans for riveting, relevant content.
Speaking of which, I found 2 timely stories.
Verizon phones to offer a YouTube service for phone users.
UCLA lecturer teaches students to work on ‘tiny screen’
The latter interests me because it is a collaboration between MTV and academia, to create/format content for the third screen as we call it. The MTV unit (mtvU) is funding the project.
The idea that ‘Me TV’ would overtake ‘Must-see TV’ is getting closer, it seems, with the TiVo fix. It’s part of the new broadband-enhanced package where people can create or download videos on their computer, andmake them available to their friends who also use TiVo.
It works like this. You create a video about your vacation, save it in a TiVo folder on your hard drive, and the software converts it into MPEG2 vido format. Then, TiVo will let you to send that video to your set-top box, and make it searchable by others on your ‘private network.’ They have to sign up for a ‘Season Pass’ for this.
Beyond showing off your kids to grandma, we could apply this concept to small businesses, or groups, opening up a new way for video file-sharing. Companies could set up their own ‘knowledge channels’ that would be available across their network.
So there is life after the "468." Specifically the 468 X 60 banner ad. This was one of the topics at Ad:tech. Digitas’ CCO Mark Beeching has a great observation, that the shift away from traditional banners is symptomatic of the move away from the interruptive model of advertising.
Good example of this is Intel’s and IBM’s use of allowing a banner ad to be a way to interact with customers. More specifically a real-time chat. Story in AdAge here.
Interesting factoid: Digitas created the first ever banner ad, 12 years ago.
Joseph Jaffe doesn’t mince his words. In his book, "Life after the 30-second spot" he declares that "There’s a putrid stench emanating from the world of advertising right now. If you can’t smell it yourself, then you’re either used to it or you’ve lost your sense of smell altogether.."
It reminds me of an equally abrasive statement by Ed Morrow in "Good Night, Good Luck" when he says to the who’s who of television that their business has plenty of "evidence of decadence, escapism and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live" and that that they, himself included should "get off, off our fat surpluses" and embrace change.
I am acutely reminded of the changes sweeping aross everything we have known in marketing and media. As a business writer, I see it first hand, but as a communicator, I see the pushback based on people unable to think and strategically, futuristically –where customers and audiences are headed. Many marketers are falling behind, so no wonder advertisers are not recognizing the stench, so to speak. There are ‘agency’ people who have just stumbled on The Tipping Point — a book published 6 years ago! The world has leapt ahead since then, but they hobble on. At this rate, they will always be playing catch up..
The new media savvy companies are implementing Wikis, podcasts, and diving into Second Life. (Others are sadly still content sprucing up their web sites and polishing up their Intranets!) Even as we speak, MIT is about to launch a new web initiative; with Tim Berners-Lee is involved, you can bet it will be something big. I’m meeting some very intersting people next week involved in social networking, VOIP, and Search. They are definitely not ‘ad’ companies, but they are pushing the envelope of marketing. Stay tuned…
"We’re not interested in reams of data that says the world has changed. We get it." That’s Maarten Albarda of Coca-Cola, the Director of Media and Communication Innovation. (now that’s a new media title!).
All this talk about the world has changed may sound like someone’s all fired up after reading Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat. It’s however a statement about the new marketing propounded by Crayon, a company I mentioned a few days ago. Crayon, launched today.
This will definitely change the pace of things in ‘old marketing’ as these guys are co-opting everyone, and turning tables on the way marketing, advertising and PR has been practiced. Just to cite a few ideas from their ‘Manifesto’ (as opposed to a mission statement) they have thrown out quite a few sacred cows: They will never pitch for business, they’ll "never downsize, rightsize, leftsize or upsize" based on mood swings (a not so subtle knock at the network agencies who hire and fire entire account groups based on clients they retain or lose), and all participants er, ‘crayons’, will be allowed to have a second life –and that includes blogging and podcasting during office hours.
And of course, they are headquartered in Second Life.
But being an open-source new marketing company, does not mean they are going to listen to everybody. There’s a fine line here. "We are not superior, and we are not subservient’ they say. Not the new media, subservient chicken version of the old agency.
SIDEBAR: Check how a new media guy is experimenting with a ‘subservient human’ idea as Steve Rubel describes it. You can even rename his website!
There’s a Tom and Jerry vignette where Tom has a blueprint for building a better mousetrap. It’s a one of those Rube Goldberg contraptions that’s supposed to end up altering the contours of Jerry’s head. It works, but not in the way Tom planned it. Jerry, shrewdly modifies the blueprint, as you can expect.
I thought of that when debating the social media press release by PR Squared. Todd Defren of Shift Communications has released a whole new company, PRX Builder, to back the idea he launched several months ago. The PRX Release, (see example here) is simple, but functional. You can test it out for free here -with a GMail account login. Or check a PDF template.
The navigation is not so intuitive, but it covers the basics -keywords, quotes, multimedia, boilerplate etc. A good text editor is built in to it.
For now, this is still the beta stage as fas as social media is concerned. I can see how, a few years from now, someone’s going to build on it in such a way that may alter the blueprint. That’s the nature of the malleable social media. Once you release it, you lose control in a good way; it morphs into something you didn’t quite expect. Not in the Tom and Jerry confrontational way, but as in Wikipedia, the spirit of co-opetition, the open-source initiative, and open source art, literature, music, and something as complex as Moodle – a community of hundreds of thousands of users in 160 countries.
So to get back to the press release, those like Lego, announcing the release of Open Source software, may eventually want to migrate to the social media format. Ad and PR agencies had better take notes, if they want to remain relevant, and not be like the buggy whip manufacturers when the first automobiles rolled into town.
I don’t know Josef Jaffe, but as a listener to his ‘Across the Sound’ podcast, I have to believe that his new company, Crayon, will change the game in marketing. Ruffle a lot of feathers, plant a stake in the ground etc. etc, etc, as Jaffe would say!
Also, he’s teaming up with two people I know, Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz –fellow IABC-ers– and CC Chapman, all of whom have made bold moves into Second Life.
So it was not that surprising that Jaffe’s tease on his blog talk about the company launch at ‘an undisclosed island,’ actually referred to an island in Second Life. Neville, Shel and CC dislosed the details. Their headquarters will include "a theater, a presentation
amphitheater, housing, and a variety of other elements that will all be
unveiled at our launch party this Thursday, October 26."
Interestingly, Crayon, true to new media and marketing, is "not an agency nor a consulting practice…What we are is whatever you want or need us to be" as Neville says. For Shel, he’s "leaving the world of sole practitionership and independent consulting to join a startup."
For those who’ve listened to Josef’s analogies of the box of crayons, the name is quintessiantial Jaffe! This out-of the-box un-company is prepared to pull any color out of its crayon box. A true mashup, when you think of it, using a real-world writing tool as a metaphor of a company that will operate solely in Second Life.
Hoipolloireport 
