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    Digital Marketing

    The Future of Video Ads.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    There was an interesting piece in the Huffington Post yesterday on the future of video. It’s author, Hunter Walk, director of product management at YouTube, believes in the near future video won’t be offline or online, it will just be.  That is, the video (TV shows, movies, consumer generated, music) we watch will be accessed on multiple devices, on demand, in hi-def.  This, says Mr. Walk, will be the result of improved wi-fi bandwidth (Aluminum foil hats will be big.), mad switching infrastructure and next gen streaming algorithms.

    Those “anywhere, anything, anytime” ads of the 90s are coming true, it seems.  Anyway, with all of this video available, the competition will be crazy.  Forget searching for all this video for a minute, let’s think about monetizing the video. There should be two options: subscription and advertising.  The advertising approach will not be based on the television model, with pods of ads running throughout the stream. We are too evolved for that. My guess is there will be a single :30 spot at the beginning of a half-hour program and 60 seconds for an hour long program. Movies will support 90 seconds and user generated content and music video will be free.

    This is the word of What’s The Idea. Peace!

    Huffington Post, wi-fi, video, video advertising, whatstheidea, whats the idea, Hunter Walk, YouTube,

    How to Charge for Social Media.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    I was chatting with a friend at JWT the other day about how agencies can’t make money in today’s social media entranced marketplace  — and I may have solved the problem.  Here goes:

    Say you come up a with a big engagement idea. It’s for a new product launch and you have created a fun video demonstration of the product.  A couple of graduate students from NYU did the production at a cost of $4,500.  You work at Publicis and know you can post the video for free and the mark-up won’t pay for the pastry at the presentation meeting.  How do you price it? Staff it? Measure it? Is it done under a retainer? Oy.

    The answer is simple: You price it based on delivered reach, with a smidgen of frequency.  If the video is viewed 0-24,999 times (uniques) you charge $2,500.  If seen 25,000 to 75,000 times $4,500….and so on.

    If the video is linked to another site, Publicis earns a bonus based on other site’s traffic plus the additional views. If the video gets played on TV or a big portal, another bonus plus those views. Think of the model as part SAG/AFTRA, part pay-per-view, part Nielsen Ratings.

    Now that wasn’t that hard, was it? Piece. I mean Peace!

    JWT. Digital as R&D.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    In a Forbes interview with David Eastman, CEO, JWT North America, he speaks of his shop’s unique place in history. Of course, some of it was the same old/same old, which made sense for the audience, but what really stuck out was JWT’s commitment to integrating digital into its offering.  Mr. Eastman may be the first digital officer to CEO a major holding company ad shop.

    For a big global shop like JWT, digital is really the R&D department. R&D never really existed at agencies before.  Sure, there were innovations think tanks and media kitchens but those were mostly window dressing.  Eastman believes R&D is an investment not an expense and because JWT hangs with major consumer brands and has a strong brand planning culture, everyone gets the value of a powerful brand idea and everyone gets a seat at the table. This R&D department isn’t off campus in a lab somewhere. Even creatives are open to the manifest destiny love (ish).

    So what does this mean?  The outputs are better.  The ads are informed by digital insights, the didge is coddled by emotional consumer brand ideas, and the media intersects at just the right moment. The work doesn’t feel like work to many consumers, it feels welcome and softly influential. “Soft influence.” Hmm, I like that.

    Sometime the approach is a little sloppy, sometimes it’s quite elegant, but it’s almost always goaled (as they say) on being brand-strategic.  In this tactics-palooza marketing world, a holding company shop with a transmedia team working with the wind at its back offers a superior product.  But you knew that. Peace!

    How Stuff Works Online.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    Here’s how retail works.  You build, lease or buy a store, fill it with stuff, promote it and people come and buy its wares.  Or they don’t.

    Here’s how TV works.  You build, lease or buy a program, fill it with entertaining or informational stuff, promote it and people come. Or they don’t.

    Here’s how the web works. You build, lease or buy a site, fill it with stuff, promote it and people come and buy its wares…if you happen to be selling anything.  Sometimes the web is used to help people decide if they want to buy your stuff, because it’s sold elsewhere.  And other times the web is about entertaining visitors encouraging them to come back so ad revenue allows the site owner to buy stuff.  And sometimes still, a website is created to just simply to impart knowledge, altruism and community. 

    That’s the thing about the web — visitors don’t always know if they are on a site to be sold, entertained or informed. Sometimes the builders of websites don’t seem to know either.  And when that happens the sites tend to provide a little bit of each.  And a little bit of each often leads to a lot of none. Fruit cocktail. Tricky stuff.  Focus is your friend.

    Spotlight On Social Media – Today and…

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    Spotlight on Social Media was held yesterday in NYC, put on by the Participatory Marketing Network (PMN) and Direct Marketing Association (DMA).  There were a couple of important takeaways every marketer should think about. 

    Intent.

    Search is still important, no doubt, but it’s a little 2008.  Immediacy – what’s happening now — is the rolling thunder these days, so services like Twitter and Foursquare are the rage but the marketing future is something Rapleaf’s co-founder Vivek Sodera calls “intent driven” applications. Think of a suped up Four Square To Do tab. Facebook will certainly build an intent-based app and others in the VC pipeline will emerge, but just know intent+social+search+moblie is going to pay out lotto style. 

    Unanonymous

    I know, I know it’s not a word. But it’s a better word then unanonymize, which is the word that clanked like a dropped crowbar off Mr. Sodera’s tongue during his presentation.  Hee hee. That said, it’s a word that wonderfully describes what Rapleaf does. Rapleaf crawls the web and creates single records of an individual’s behaviors, activities and associations.  And surprisingly, it’s not that scary.  They do this using your email address and a cool piece of software. In email or direct parlance they append records using the social web. When I asked to be unanonymized, the Rapleaf software generated 100 of my web proclivities, the first of which was something called “Social Care” a membership I did not recall.  All the rest were spot on. 

    Facebook

    Facebook also presented at Spotlight and mentioned its 60 million daily logins put prime time television to shame. Sean Mahoney’s case studies of marketer successes were very impressive and prove that Facebook is the “new” digital. Its targeting capabilities are phenomenal.  There are specialty ad and marketing shops opening up just to handle Facebook-enabled selling and they’re worth looking in to.  It’s a cottage industry on the way to becoming transformational.   

    Others

    Other smart companies worth mentioning include Acxiom, a behemoth company that also transforms social data into social profiles (for targeted marketing), Cisco which has a neat B2B app in its NowVan program (like Kogi BBQ trucks for routers) and Air Miles a rewards program out of Canada, trying hard and having very good success. 

     Michael Della Penna of the PMN and Conversa Marketing and Neil O’Keefe of DMA deserve shout outs for empanelling a great program. Peace..it together!

    Rubel, Facebook and Fruit Cocktail.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    There’s a pretty interesting debate going on over at Steve Rubel’s Posterous stream.  It revolves around his moving his stream (sorry, guys of a certain age) to Facebook.  He’ll continue at Posterous but feels Facebook gives him more visibility, a bigger audience and a richer discussion. 

    Mr. Rubel initially moved to Posterous because it was a place for him to aggregate his musings. Plus it was an easy and elegant interface.  (The aesthete in me likes the Posterous look better than the templatized Facebook frame.)  Sequestering most of his business and digital observations on Posterous and moving everything  else — business, personal, real time — to Facebook seems like a good strategy. But is it? Time will tell.

    Specificity

    In America and countries that look to America for tech and taste, specificity rules the day.  No one ever became president (of anything) being a generalist.  Let’s leave Mr. Rubel for a moment and use Ms. X as an example.  Say you’ve never met Ms. X but you think she’s a brilliant marketing mind. She may be a lousy partner, driver, dancer and cook but she can really mesmerize a room filled with marketers. You may be marginally interested in her meatball recipe but it is certainly not the driver of her attention.  The more meatball recipes in her stream, the less likely she is to be unique. By mixing all of her postings into one stream, Ms. X is not managing her brand very well. Her fame is diluted.

    Moving Toward the Middle.

    This is another example – common a couple of years ago when social computing companies were all trying to match each other’s feature sets – where everyone is moving toward the middle. It should not be. LinkedIn is about business relationships. Twitter is about real time info and immediacy.  Facebook is about friends and self and entertainment.  As Facebook moves to the middle, attempting to be all things to all people (brand fan pages included), it becomes like fruit cocktail — that can of fruit in the back of the cabinet where everything tastes like peaches. As quickly as Facebook is growing, I’m afraid it will mirror Google and turn into nothing more than an amazing advertising platform. (And then divest.) Peace!

    Alice in a Wondrous Land.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    Alice is the coolest internet app around.  It’s a website that allows consumers to buy directly from the manufacturer…with a promise of low, low prices because the products aren’t inflated by retail shelf stocking fees and other costs associated with driving traffic to retail.  

    They promise one box, though how that can be with purchases coming straight from the manufacturer is beyond me.  Alice also offers free shipping, a product planner allowing users to restock based on past purchase dates, and a drag-and-drop interface even a caveman would love. 

    Though I haven’t done the deep dive on Alice, it is the future. It won’t cover fresh produce but that’s not too far down the road, no doubt available from a web start-up run by a smart farm consortium. Alice is taking baby steps which is the way to go. (I was in a meeting with a major packaged goods company and all of its agencies last week and only a handful had even heard of Alice.)  This is how we  — especially the next gen — will shop for staples.  Alice reminds me of a post I wrote a couple of years ago suggesting that the size of home mail boxes will grow significantly as web commerce develops.  Alice may not be the Amazon of its time, but if it gets the usability and customer delivery right it will be the template for the world’s biggest app. Peace!

    The Digital Triangle. The Perfect Start-up Womb.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    The digital triangle, located in NYC, bears three distinct corners.  DUMBO in Brooklyn. SOHO in Manhattan. Union Square, also in Manhattan.

    DUMBO is where the coders are.  A youthful tech workforce who live digitally-centric lives, they are smart and have engineer-friendly minds. (A lot of gamer consoles burn out in DUMBO.) It’s a little men and boy heavy.  Union Square is where the money is.  Where the incubators are.  It’s where the DUMBO denizens with entrepreneurial spirit visit with their hands out.  It’s close to NYU and also has a lovely, youthful energy. Parking is expensive in Union Square but the smart money walks the streets.  SOHO is what makes the digital triangle different.  It is where designers, the truly creative and exceptionally beautiful like to call home. They don’t live there really, just work, shop and hang. If you can’t get inspired in SOHO with all its art, nubes, soft tacos, fashion, and vibe, you can’t get inspired.  All these neighborhoods are a subway or bike ride apart and feed off of each other. It is a perfect storm for start-ups.  

    Unlike Sand Hill Road (money), its surrounding neighborhoods of Menlo Park, Palo Alto, etc. (tech engineers) and San Francisco (ad people) the Digital Triangle is close but not really connected. The west coast likes campuses. It works but not like the digital triangle. As technology’s pull increases and more and more of the economy is tied to digital commerce, NYC will grow in importance globally and will become a tech capital with no peer. Just ask Fred Wilson. Peace.

    Smartphone Apps Flowing Like Mothers Milk.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    Milk Monitor is an application available from the AppStore. It allows iPhone (and possibly iPad) toting moms to tap and record their babies milk consumption. The data can be stored, reviewed and trended at a later date.  Apparently moms like to do this kind of stuff – typically using bits of paper and napkins when recording on the road.  If you have a baby on your shoulder tapping is better than typing.  If you are carrying a smartphone around anyway and recording this data helps – especially for fussy babies — this is a great application. Go iPhone!  Go app developer!

    Application development at the smartphone level is like life on another planet.  There are currently 80 trillion apps (JK) for the iPhone today and about 6,000 for the PC (please don’t retweet, I didn’t count).  Now most iPhone apps don’t get used, but that’s not the point.  Some may. Some may help. Some will even save lives. And that’s cool.

    Just as Twitter will open new doors for smart marketers, smartphones and their apps will open new rooms for marketers.  The application developers who think like people first and coders second are the ones who will win.  

    The developer of Milk Monitor deserves congratulations two times: one for the app, one for the new bouncing baby she’s feeding. Peace!

    I Smell a Twitter Revolution.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    Twitter’s soon-to-be-launched service @earlybird will transform marketing. @earlybird is a promotional service that posts participating companies’ specials and deals on a wide variety of products and services — a cut of each sale going to Twitter. It will generate billions in incremental sales for sponsoring companies and serious revenue basis points for Twitter. Such a deal!   

    No doubt they will find a way to organize these deals by category, e.g., restaurants, technology, consumer packaged goods and, more importantly, geography.  Think of it as  Woot.com but offering thousands of deals a day.  Someone commented about the service in The New York Times, thinking that it would gum up their twitter feed — deals flying across the screen every minute, but the beauty of Twitter is that you don’t have to follow @earlybird (I hope) you just have to visit the tweet stream. 

    Twitter will transform commerce well beyond coupons and customer service. And this 140 character promotional vehicle is just the beginning. The idea to have an idea.  I can smell marketers lining up. And small local businesses?  They’ll have an absolute  field day with this thing.  Oh the possibilities. Can’t wait. Peace!

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