Television in the broadband era

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

How will we watch TV five years from now? In our attention-deficit media environment, every story in print or on radio seems to draw us online with the "more information online at…" footnote or sidebar.  In a few weeks form now (Sept 5th 2006) CBS will begin to simulcast its evening news with Katie Couric, a definite nod to the fact that the once-captive TV audience is moving into broadband.

On the face of it, this doesn’t seem like anything new, because they have been all taking baby steps in this direction. ABC, NBC and others have all begun streaming news off their web sites. But not live, as will now become the standard. A few years from now we will wonder how we ever put up with time-delayed news clips for so long. Apart from news, there’s the entertainment side of things that’s clearly feeling the YouTube effect. CBS PrimeTime will make available hits like CSI and Survivor on Innertube, the broadband counterpart irolled out earlier this year.

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Diet Coke and Mentos, the ultimate viral experience

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

There is viral, and there is truly professional material. The latter includes the EpyBird production’s take on the Belagio fountain. This video, by the now famous Fritz and Stephen is one of the best out there for the Diet Coke-Mentos work, as well as what constitutes good viral material

I don’t mean to be too harsh on Agency.com, working in and coming from the agency world, but I would have expected them to ‘roll big’ in another direction, and give new meaning to a client pitch. If you’ve worked on the client side, you’ve probably sat through ‘creative’ pitches that looked more like beauty pageants and stunts, and wondered "where’s the work, old chap?" Arguably, this is more on the lines of demonstrating the ‘work’ they can produce, but as many have argued, you have to do better than prove you can shoot a video and upload it to YouTube. (Two Chinese fellas who lipsync badly can do that too!) They are indeed gutsy in puting their reputation on the line at the expense of winning an account. Agencies need to take risks. Heck, all creatives need to step out of their comfort zone and take risks. But I am not sure if the Subway pitch in this format was worth going viral. I kept looking for that denoument, that big idea that would hit us between the eyes and believe Subway would not be able to resist these guys, but it never came. What has ensued is a debate about what constitutes a viral campaign, and the agency’s setting up of a blog on this topic, sort of acknowledges that there’s a lot to learn.

Contrast this to the Mentos-Diet Coke video, and they dont just prove they can shoot video but really do something creative on camera, and this is what’s gets people talking –positively. Isn’t that the whole idea of going viral?

Draper Fisher Jurvetson which supposedly coined the term ‘viral marketing,’ talked of it being an "implied endorsement from a friend." Many people have emulated the Diet Coke-Mentos idea, and the videos –at least the good ones- gather endorsement as they are passed along. But an agency’s goal of winning an account, does not require such audience endorsement. If this is what it was looking for, what does that say about it being able to understand its target audience?

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The first Cluetrain ad

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Now here’s a move that’s bolder than I expected. Ford, on it’s Bold Moves site has a dealer talking about the company being "a huge ship that takes forever to turn" and a marketing manager prefacing at a presentation about low morale. Marketing Vox is also reporting how Henry Copeland of Blogads has called a new bactch of ads the ‘first Cluetrain ad.’

This spot opens with a spokesperson for the Rainforest Action Network, talking of Ford’s problem. She is followed by an ‘industry analyst’ and others who continue the unflattering view. Ok, so there is some optimism that follows, with talk about hydrogen fuel fleets and the environment. But it sure tells a more compelling story than conventional commercials that feature beauty shots of cars zipping through the countryside. The new beauty shots are gas stations with the price boards displaying high prices, belching smokestacks and ugly congested freeways.

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Subway agency pitch a bizarre experiment

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

I’ve scrutinized the so-called viral video and it beats me why an agency would think of this as the most creative way to pitch a client. Does the fact that a team can put-together hand-held video footage (some parts obviously staged) tell you anything about their approach? They talk of wanting to ‘learn about the customers’ perspective’ as if it was some secret sauce for marketing. And what’s with that ‘research’ question a woman asks of a man on the street. he seems to walk away in a hurry and she asks "are you allowed to talk to women?" if I was Subway, I would be deeply troubled by handing over my account to people who trivialize what understanding customers is all about.

Sure, the stint about working at the restaurant for a day was a good idea, but nothing novel there. Agencies have done that for years. As Steve Rubel aptly puts it, in the macro sense, Agency.com has set back the credibility of the social media, and hurt all interactive agencies

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Amazon’s video ups the ante

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Amazon’s got the brand recognition, and the marketing savvy to own the digital video space. It’s a very crowded playing field in the digital download business when you consider iTunes, Zune (the Microsoft answer to the iPod)  Urge, and not to mention YouTube, and DivX (a Google partner)

AdAge looks at it as "the digital version of the Netflix rental model."

Having watched the FishBowl experiment on Amazon, I can see how they’ll find some very creative ways market their service. Apple, meanwhile is rumored to have a larger video iPod, so suddenly it could be a battle between not just like-minded services, but service provider vs technology.

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The influentials

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

Unlike The Influentials in Jon Berry and Ed Keller’s book about early adopters and their marketing potential, a new study by Onalytica shows the role of influentials in blog marketing.

In this list, Steve Rubel’s Micro Persuasion scores higher than Fast Company, and even Business Week. Onalytica is a British-based consultancy that monitors the influence factor on markets and brands. It has studied such things as the role of influentials in topics such as bird flu, stem cells and CSR, noting that measuring popularity is not the same as measuring influence.

The real value of such influence measurement is if they are grounded in context, they say. Especially in a world where keywords are so important, this study opens up a few windows into the field of ranking methods (Technorati, Google etc) that most take for granted.

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mobile phones drawn to the web

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Those small screens, and the poor navigation on cell phones have held them back as far as m-commerce goes. I am optimistic that the W3 Consortium‘s Mobile Web Initiative might change this. Its Best Practices1.0 recognizes that web experiences which are essentially desktop-based should accomodate to devices that are different.

Soon we’re going to perform most of the web transactions on our mobile devices, as Paypal’s text to buy program shows. I could buy something by sending a text message to a number placed on an ad, and by typing the product’s item code in the body of my sms. Of course, since PayPal is now a part of eBay, a financial interface for mobiles will draw other online ecommerce sites to experiment with similar services.

Sprint, Verizon, T-mobile and Alltel support Paypal’s service, while O2, Orange, T-mobile, Virgin, Vodafone and even Tesco in the UK do so.

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Ultimate number: Word of mouth can be word of biceps!

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Fred Reichheld’s book The Ultimate Question is facinating stuff for those interested in loyalty marketing. Who isn’t? Reichheld is known today for that esoteric Net Promoter score used by companies like GE for some years. It’s sort of the new, new thing for companies. Coming on the heels of continuous improvement and six sigma, (also adopted by GE) there’s some suspicion that its another fad.

However, there’s nothing faddish about tracking customer referrals and checking the pulse of your loyalty, no matter what you call it. Reichheld observes on a MarketingProfs presentation how he once had a converston with Harley Davidson CEO about retention as a measurement criteria for loyalty, and found that Harley wasn’t concerned about that number. Harley, he was told measures the percentage of customers who had the company tattooed on some body part. Hard to believe that, but then again, it’s Harley. He also says that if he had listened more closely, he would have written this book much earlier. You own customers’ loyalty when they cobrand their reputation with yours, Reichheld notes. It’s not word of mouth, it’s word of biceps for Harley.

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Businesses that blog –the more authentic voice

/ Angelo Fernando / 2 Comments

Should every CEO maintain a blog? That’s a question being asked more often now, with the rise in popularity of CEO blogs such as new evidence on how much businesses lag on the blogging front is reported today in MediaPost’s Online Media Daily. Only 5.8% of the top Fortune 500 companies have blogs.

In a recent article I wrote for CW Bulletin, I noted how communicators, and the PR department in a company may want to blog, and even the CEO may be tempted to start his own blog, but there’s another department that usually frowns on such endeavors: the legal department. The Jonathan Schwartz and Bob Lutz blogs for Sun and GM respectively, may not be enough to tip the scales of corporate blogging. What it might take is for a lot of smaller companies to prove its value, and create a bottom-up momentum.

Take a look at Munjal Shah’s blog about Riya, a small company with a big idea –a visual search engine that uses face and image recognition to search the web. He says things no corporate communications person would dare say anywhere, apart from on a blog. Commenting on one reviewer of his service, he observes:

While I disagree with some of their UI comments (especiall because they wrote it before I blogged the new search strategy), from an SEO perspective, Riya is a disaster. We haven’t done even the most basic things like good meta-tags.

That’s right, the CEO calling his product a "disaster." How often do you see that level of frankness in product blogging? The ability to say things minus the spin is what makes company blogs more credible. There’s the approved company voice on its web site, and there’s the true voice on its blog. If you were a customer, which one would you return to?

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The other Nano scores big

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

Nano_plus PC World’s james Martin reviews on technology talks up the Creative’s Zen Nano Plus and how it came out ahead among other similar MP3 players in PC world’s audio-quality tests.

On output and frequency response, in addition to features such as an FM tuner (absent in an iPod) and more radio presets than its competitors, the other Nano is a better buy and a better experience. You could tell, I use one!

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