Prism - Start of Something New?

Prism
Absolutely brilliant idea from the people at Mozilla (the company that makes Firefox). They've put together a cunning programme that will take individual websites and make them have their own window.

What's the point?


Basically it makes webapps better by removing the browser 'clutter' at the top which makes the whole thing look like a webpage. The plan is that you won't be able to tell the difference between using Google Docs and using MS Word or something like that.

When this is finished, expect to see it become an integral part of Google pack. It'll work with other software too, I'm sure Zoho will be all over it too. This Web 3.0 that everyone's talking about may actually be Desktop 2.0. Let's make a buzzword generator to cover it all off...

How to promote a museum

Flickr: Victoria and Albert Museum

Really nice idea from the V&A.

Nice bit of interactivity and also encourages people to label their photos when they put them on flickr.

Would be interesting to see if anyone has gotten around to collecting stats on what they've been up to but I doubt that they have. Nice marketing idea that hasn't cost anyone much time or effort.

Will definitely post some pictures up there from next time I visit.

Child Copyright Violator

Inside the Mind of a 9 Year Old File-Sharer | TorrentFreak

Nice little interview with a junior filesharer. It is interesting thinking about all these kids who are growing up with very little concept of how to obey copyright law.

The key is that people are going to break the law if it's easy and pretty much consequence free. There's a whole host of software out there specifically designed to make it easy for you to cheat and to make it easy for you to hide what you're doing.

The quality of the IT work by the rights holder is pretty much abysmal so you can be sure that the nine year olds are going to be able to stay one step ahead of them (by using software written by other people). The studios do seem to be seeing the light in regard to this, but there is still some work to be done.

Ideally (for us!) the perfect solution will be a subscription to a free service that will randomly insert ads in between songs, or in the middle of videos. I think the majority of people will be comfortable downloading something that is convenient, easy to use and reliable in exchange for a couple of adverts.

Overall I think we can succeed in changing behaviour if we replace free with free. We won't if we replace free with pay options - Bittorrent won't disappear and will always be the default option for many people.

Facebook vs Myspace Round 95

Really good article going through the various methodologies used to compare traffic across lots of different sites.

Summary is that there's been a little controversy in the States where the standard measurement (Comscore) decided that Facebook had actually lost users and market share in the previous month. Obviosuly this didn't quite chime with the current levels of hype and hysteria around the product.

Something's going on!


It highlights the difficutly of getting good numbers from the larger websites. In the UK we have settled on measurement from ABCe, these numbers are slightly better than the majority of other numbers shown. However, there is still scope to game these numbers and the publishers have a huge incentive to do so. ABC numbers in the press world are often artificially boosted using a range of different methods.

Facebook is definitely not alone in finding huge discrepancies between the (genuine) numbers that they see and the (estimated) numbers that the panels produce. The problem is finding the genuine number. We as advertisers and agencies do not wish to make decisions based on numbers provided by salespeople. Publishers are rightly aggreived when decisions are based on numbers which do not represent their situation.

It's difficult to find a solution and it would be a mistake to think any other media has comprehensively solved this. The ABCe is a welcome development which will hopefully grow larger in time. I'm sure someone somewhere is working on something even better, but we'll have to settle for some kind of slow industry standard in the meantime.

Cheeky Monkeys

Was looking through to find out who was using radianrss to subscribe to this blog, and what the hell radianrss was.

Did a search on google and got this

Google obviously thought that I meant to search for radiators. What's interesting is that it threw up search ads for radiators. It would be interesting to know how many of our ads are appearing against terms which bore VERY little relation to the words that are being searched for. Seriously - radianrss is quite a different mess of characters from radiators...

It's a good way for them to inflate their revenues still further.

Analyse This

Google ratcheted the quality of their analytics product up by another notch this week.

They have now included two core features into their analytics engine - internal search and event tracking.

Internal Search
They are now able to track people's search behaviour on individual sites. This isn't the hugest new feature for the majority of users on this product. However, any internet retailer will find this hugely useful as it will show how easy the site is to navigate in 'last resort' terms.
I haven't seen any evidence to support my view that search is usually the last thing people use to navigate within a site, but I believe this to be the case with the majority of stores. Only a store with more than roughly fifty products should feel the need to push their search function. All other sites should consider their site design and find ways to guide customers to the right destination without needing them to explicitly tell you what they're after.
For those that do have large numbers of products, it gives an insight into products that are important to customers. It can give an idea about rapid changes in popularity of generic ranges of goods. Admittedly we already have access to which product pages people are looking at, but searches should do some of the categorisation for us.
It will also open up possibilities in terms of measuring the performance of the search pages - tweaks will now be more easy to appreciate.

Event Tracking
This feature would have made a real difference when we were working on Jellyfish. Basically it allows things to be tracked when they don't involve a new page being loaded. Jellyfish was a particular problem since the page only tracked as one URL as far as google analytics could see. Event tracking should mean that we will be able to look at the performance of flash and ajax parts of sites.
More visibility is crucial here and I'm surprised it's taken this long for Google to put in a fix to this problem. Web 2.0 is fast becoming obsolete in terms of jargon, to be replaced by web 3.0 - surely this will then be supplanted by web 3.1 and then maybe web 95?

Anyway, Google are showing us that they're going to continue putting effort into analytics. It will be interesting to see what they come up with once the acquisition of doubleclick is complete. Their tracking system will be really comprehensive then!

Sony Gets Ready to Sell

As everyone knows, gamers are not spending as much time as marketers would like looking at adverts.

Sony seem to have picked up on this theme. In order to make themselves pick up on the potential profits, they are now hiring people to make this happen.

Seems strange that it's taken almost a year to get this sorted out. Large numbers of people already use their systems on a daily basis. Sony control the interface and are also heavily involved in the coding of many of the titles that are released. This means that they can ensure that the adverts are as loud and intrusive as Sony want it to be.

Users will obviously be rather annoyed if the advertising is overly intrusive, this will interfere with their experience. However, they'll probably accept the advertising if it gives them something tangible.

It will be interesting to see how they manage it. At the moment games advertising seems to focus on getting very unobtrusive ads across the game. I suspect Sony will be able to find ways to get bigger and better ads sneaking into the system. Loading screens could definitely use some expansion, and there are usually a good couple of screens within a game that spend a disproportionate amount of time in front of gamers' faces.

Some of the solutions even offer branded characters within the game, though I think this would be a difficult thing to dynamically insert into the code. I'll look forward to hearing from Sony.

Microsoft Health?

Ars are reporting that Microsoft are in the process of establishing a private system of health records that you can easily take between doctors. It's a really good idea. The NHS are currently spending £12Bn to do just this. Somebody should have told them!
There will be some slightly geeky people who will post a link to this repository from their facebook pages. This will be a little odd, but possible.

This product follows a long trend of people giving sites more and more personal information. There are already services within the US that will look after your bank account for you (Wesabe) and we all know how much info people put onto their facebook and myspace pages.

I read an interesting article (though unfortunately I can't remember where!) comparing web application providers with Banks. Basically you're asking them to store your information and the relationship is entirely founded on trust.

We're still not quite at the point where we can define what we expect from a company in terms of trust - we definitely don't want them to make the information publicly available, but people seem comfortable with some information going to advertisers. If you ask people if they want to share their information, they'll say no - but people are easily swayed by the offer of free services.

I think the evolution of the relationship between application providers and the public will end up hinging on the trust issue. We still haven't seen anyone mishandle privacy in any major way. It will be interesting to see what people's reaction to a mishap will be. Would we see something analogous to a bank run?

Let's wait and see what happens if google accidentally publishes the wrong thing.

Free Trend Continues

Chris Anderson wrote a book about the ‘long tail’ last year (for those of you who haven’t heard that phrase please ask someone in search!).

His next book takes the idea further, from small logistic costs to minimal logistical costs. In other words, what happens when there is no distribution cost and how certain things which we currently pay for (and value) could possibly turn into something free.

His initial predictions are coming true already - Radiohead are releasing their new album in exchange for a 'fair price donation'.
Newspapers are currently fighting among themselves to pull down the subscriber 'walls' within their sites. Good article here

Decent Advert from ITV

ITV seem to be trying to make people notice their programmes a bit more.


I like their latest outing - caught it on the front page of the Guardian:



It's quite rare to see people being brave with online advertising. There seems to be tendency for clients to sit behind the creatives with a whip shouting "More Flashing! More Text! Why doesn't it say 'click here!'" Glad to see someone's experimenting to see if intrigue can drive some interest to the site.

Obviously it has been tried before, but there's a good whack of investment behind it - homepage of the Guardian is not cheap.

Gordon Brown's Favourite Phrases

Although Swivel is one of my favourite sites at the moment (currently being overwhelmed by the Economist's daily chart news story), Many Eyes from IBM supplies some fantastic options for analysing text content. Unfortunately it does not yet offer embedding.

Have a look at the two pages I created analysing the text of Gordon's Speech:

First a normal tag cloud

Secondly a text analysis that shows the way certain words were used.


Quite useful way to get to the heart of a long speech. Could be useful for a presentation - turning a long argument into bite sized slides?

DoubleClick Launches Site-Side Mobile Ad Management, Advertiser Version in Development DoubleClick Launches Site-Side Mobile Ad Management, Ad

Here we go...

Finally we're seeing the big boys start to take mobile seriously. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. I've been using Opera's mobile browser in recent weeks and I've been hugely impressed. It converts normal pages (not flash) into pages that are digestible on the mobile. They've also made a good interface that allows the pages to be navigated easily.

There is a slowly rousing argument that there should be no need to develop more than one site for any major media owner - the phone should be able to translate the site's content into a readable format. The problem at the moment is that there's very little in it for the sites - what do they gain from allowing people to read their content, for free, with ads being automatically stripped out.

Hopefully doubleclick's solution will allow sites to begin receiving money for the effort they put into developing their mobile sites. There is more and more content being accessed on the move. Google have put a good amount of effort into helping with local navigation. All the networks have good quality portals with sports results, simple news and travel information.

At some point soon there will be GPS systems which will also be reasonably usable browsers - this should allow passengers to find internet enabled content around their destinations and current locations. Mobile internet isn't necessarily limited to phones, there is plenty of room for location aware uses. Laptops being used with identified and registered hotspots will allow sites to begin to deliver customised content.

My own opinion is that the level of customisation available will not be fully taken up by the vast majority of advertisers in the beginning. Too much customisation will scare and alienate consumers, while the amount of effort and technological development required will put the majority off the investments needed.

However, DoubleClick, Google and their competitors will hopefully take much of the work out of delivering adverts on these platforms.

We'll see what happens!

Hours of Thought

Manny
Originally uploaded by mild_swearwords

Saw this in the tube the other day. Think it's in Holloway Tube.

Fantastically targeted product, placement and creative.

I'd be surprised if much thought was put into the advert to be honest, but they didn't need to. The story pretty much writes the advert. They've just taken the back of the book and put it into the poster.

Then, to add to the brilliance of the poster, they've added a competition to win some shoes. Simply awesome.

I suspect this has been made directly by the client, and well done them!

Old School PR fails to attract people to website

Some idiot from Howto.tv seems to be trying to get some free publicity for their website. They had the original idea of running a survey to find out people's attitudes to things on the internet.

This had the wonderful effect of finding out that people don't like popup ads. Very surprising. Somehow (I suspect a fancy lunch was involved) the survey managed to find its way into the Guardian as an aside within their business section.

They were very lucky and the article included the name of the site. This was then let down by the fact that their rubbish site has had no search optimisation whatsoever. Therefore it was difficult to find, and the site's listing on google just gives T&Cs.

I think more people would be able to find them if they did a bit of advertising. This might annoy the sort of person who will fill in an online survey, but at least it will be remembered.

Generic PR

It seems strange that a small project the size of Jellyfish can end up having such a range of people commenting on it.

To be completely fair to natmags, it was a small concern. They have a total staff of around 1,500 in the UK. Eight of them were directly involved in the launch and continuation of the Jellyfish project.

This has generated a decent amount of inquiry from people interested in the magazine industry.

The immediate verdict seems to be that the email delivery system was suspect, due to unconfirmed rumours across the industry.

I think, as someone who was there, I can safely say that there were a number of different reasons and pinning it down to one reason is more than slightly artificial.

There is more than one way to skin a cat, and there is more than one way to market a site. Jellyfish had healthy strategy and implementation across the entirety of the project but did not manage to gain enough traction with the target audience.

The main lesson is that the web is all about unique content which is refreshed often. Jellyfish did not fit either of those two criteria and so died reasonably quickly.


Does anybody have an example of a non-daily web publication working well? (Apart from Popbitch...)?

Yahoo acquires online collaboration suite Zimbra

Interesting move from Yahoo!

The net will be abuzz with news how Yahoo! is trying to get into the whole web 3.0 desktop \ web app delivery nonsense.

Basically Yahoo! is trying to stay within touching distance of Google. To be fair, Zimbra's application suite was more than slightly better than Google's, with the presentation app in particular stronger by far than anything else I've seen on the market.

We do have to remember that Yahoo! is still struggling in a variety of different ways, not least their inability to extract a decent value out of the inventory they are currently selling. For some reason they are concentrating on competing with networks to offer extremely cheap inventory whereas they should be leaving the networks to scrap over remnant inventory and spending their time selling their more upscale stuff.

I've still never had a salesperson try to sell me any of Yahoo!'s genuinely innovative sites - flickr, del.icio.us and the like. Yahoo! has proved adept at purchasing companies but it has yet to prove itself with the most important phase - the exploitation.

The slow decline of Lycos

For anyone who was wondering why Lycos has been slowly declining in performance in recent years.


It used to be that about.com and imdb were just sidetracks for Lycos' UK sales offering. They now seem to account for more than three quarters of Lycos' traffic. Although Lycos is beginning to focus a little more on providing content, it is starting to struggle.

My own opinion is that portals will become less relevant in the future. As more offline content providers begin to move online, people will seek out better content from them. Once people know where they can receive the news \ information they want, the only portal they need to visit will be their search engine.

The growth among portals is relatively static at the moment. This graph shows where they are:


Microsoft did something to messenger in January that I think has something to do with the spike in traffic. It also did some suspicious things to their daily visits.

I think that within a year we'll begin to see the larger portals start to show signs of decline. You can't be all things to all people, and the social networks will replace the portals as the homepage of choice.

Are we Geeky Enough?

Had an extended discussion last night with some people from my agency about Geekines.

Are we, as an agency, geeky enough. Considering that we specialise in digital media, there seems to be far too little gadget worship and far too little interest expressed in some of the things many people are wasting their lives doing. This is definitely not an agency specific problem.
Media owners seem to focus on giving us entertainment that wouldn't be out of place for Lawyers or general people. Obviously everyone wants to watch Wimbledon or something but only one media owner ever offered us a night out at NAMCO (which was awesome).
There is a general lack of blog reading, rss usership and other proven signs of geekiness. While I understand that our industry needs to understand all sides of the spectrum of digital usage, it does worry me that some people do not know what digg is. Our sales people sometimes genuinely have no concept of why their users are spending large amounts of time with their sites. The people selling me a particularly engaging music service did not and do not have their own accounts.
We need to find a way to find people in the industry rediscover the joy of experiencing a new product, regardless of whether it's any use. Gadgets and web services are always good, no matter how pointless. Twitter may be incomprehensible to most of us, but very few people have tried it.
As digital media planners, we're being beaten by some of the offline account planners. They're no longer just saying 'lets put up a myspace profile' they're actually spending time in the digital environment. If we don't put some effort in they'll be the ones guiding the advertising and therefore the money.

The Mail Grows On

I have completely missed the rise and rise of the Daily Mail. Since they did their relatively soft launch about a year ago, they've seen a steady rise in their UK traffic figures.

Comscore shows the region they're currently in:



Of course the wonderful work our team did on the Sun has paid dividends in terms of driving traffic to the Sun - it's now receiving the most traffic of any news site in the UK.

The real surprise is the Mail though, when we look at relative growth rates, the Mail is just about growing faster than the Sun. They are only three percent below the rate the Sun's been seeing.

Some makes sense as the core audience for the Mail is only coming online at the moment. However, this is unlikely to be the only reason for the drive. I suspect there has been some in-paper advertising going on, but it would definitely be interesting to find out some more info.

One of the obvious areas of growth for them has been their daily visitors:



Many of the papers use their daily stats as a key metric - they relate it directly to their daily circulation. On this measure, the Mail actually beats the Times and the Telegraph at the moment (their visitors are obviously coming back on more days than their competitors).

The Sun absolutely cleans up on this one at the moment, which gives a graph I suspect we'll use in the next awards entry! I won't put it into Swivel, but they're approaching double the Guardian's number.


Overall I think we're going to see the Mail attempting to wield a little more influence in the coming months. As much as I hate to say it, but I think we're going to have to spend some money with the Mail...

Pride

Adverganza in the US came up with an interesting point yesterday. Why don't we sell ourselves as an industry more?

The ONS had to point out the disproportionate contribution us advertising and marketing bods made to the UK economy. We, as an industry, lead the world in terms of adapting to the changing face of media and advertising.

At the same time, our government seems to lead the world in making up new things were not allowed to advertise and new times that we're not allowed to do it in. Advertising pays for people (and children) to experience culture and information that they would have to otherwise pay for. At it's best it is a force for equality and change - letting people know about things which they would otherwise be unaware.

We always have special things to point to, but I think there are a couple we should be proud of:
Organic food - scientific crap but still a source of greenery unequalled so far
Ending animal testing - protesters get so far but once the body shop got going everyone else followed
Jamie's School Dinners - a TV ad campaign \ PR stunt ended up making the government change policy
Drink Driving - another case for advertising proving able to change people's opinions
M&S - advertising gave people a reason to revisit the shop, saving a british institution

Obviously we're not perfect at all points, but we have shown that we can act responsibly - the ASA is a good case study. In the end we are all rational actors and have huge amounts at stake to ensure that our brands and our agencies have long term futures. We are not about to put all that at risk for the sake of short term gain.