Newspapers Trying To Evolve

Will be interesting to see if there are any anti-competitive actions out of what this group of newspapers are planning to do.

So the American guys are getting together in Chicago to go through what they can do.

Our European guys are getting together in Barcelona to discuss their digital problems. Would have thought they can webconference that!

My own opinion is that there's room for a couple of large news providers to function but not room for all the ones that currently exist. Some are going to have to explore different ways to do what they do, and stomach a huge drop in their earnings.

Got Published!

After a long period of not having time to actually write anything for this, I recently got hte chance to write an opinion piece for our industry mag, "Media Week".

The subject was sparked off by an article by Rupert Murdoch talking about the fact that free content will not endure.

My edited opinion is below. Wrote it in about three hours so it doesn't detail everything I wanted to.

Essentially I think charging is unavoidable for most news sites. I think the bit they add value to are the opinion sections rather than the news sections (many people write news, few people write opinion that people agree with).

The future news site will select relevant news stories from various sources and then add in their own opinion. You'll have to pay to see the opinion but the selection \ filtering will be free.

That's what I think anyway. Grand writing here:

Looking at newspapers' current print-focused businesses, it's almost enough to cheer bankers up.

Their traditional market is drying up, attacked from the internet, the BBC, TV and freesheets. The inescapable problem is that papers make as much from the cover price than from advertising. But there's simply not enough money to support the number of online news sites.

Fantasy football or crosswords do not provide sufficient money either. Charging will come about or the number of news sources will have to reduce significantly. Charging users will be painful and needs a good micro-payment system, which doesn't yet exist.

If an easy way of paying a couple of pence per article can be implemented, then charging will happen successfully. Subscription will be a struggle, but giving users options is always the sensible way to run.

'Pre-historic Viagra' found in Siberian mammoth DNA could boost your sex life and let you live longer | Mail Online

Does anybody ever fact check?

Just a quick Google search shows this "Anatoli Broushkov" seems to have appeared within the last twelve hours on Google - nothing is older.

There's no journal publication being mentioned, nothing with any detail on it...

Seems a completely random thing to test the bacteria for too.

Good news of the day

Blue line is 'Redundancy' and red line is 'recession'. Running just for the UK.

Ouch!

Sprout getting Confident

Sprout Builder Pricing | Sprout
Gave the Sprout Builder a go a couple of months ago (might have been a year!). I was very impressed with its abilities, though I don't think I've got enough design experience to create anything useful.

I like seeing that they're confident enough to start charging. It will be interesting - I've seen some agencies charge as much as £20,000 for building a Widget. I'm not sure what they used to build it but the fact Sprout are now willing to create solutions directly for agencies means we may see some slightly more realistic prices for Widgets.

My own opinion is that, while free is good, quality is better. Paid for apps tend to be more usable than those that are free. The most usable (in my opinion) are the ones that are paid for by advertising since they have to bring people back to using it.

Once more agencies are using tools like Sprout (rather than just randomly building from scratch) we could see some better Widgets appear.

What's True?

I'm increasingly thinking the best solution for the Israel vs Palestine problem would be a big games tournament, using an obscure board game that none of them are likely to have played.

Decided to have a read of some of the things which are happening. It's quite interesting in some ways.

Public relations
Although many of the recent wars (or probably more accurately 'sustained airstrikes') have featured some PR, this one has even more. The decisions that the military and government are taking are talked about in terms of the propaganda effect they are trying to achieve.
They are doing well in terms of keeping Hamas' rocket fire in the frame, though in some ways I'm quite impressed with their ability to keep firing despite the efforts that Israel is putting in.
An own goal though would be the IDF's YouTube channel. It reminds me hugely of one of the parts of Call of Duty IV.

IDF hitting Gazans:

Call of Duty hitting Randoms:



I honestly think this kind of video is pretty awful for their public relations as it highlights the asymmetric nature of the conflict. It's people using little Mortars against robots. They're not going to win...

Sourcing Information
The most interesting thing from this conflict is the issues with information are being brought to bear. I was watching the C4 news this evening and an IDF spokesperson was seriously questioning whether the Red Cross was actually a credible source against that of the IDF. For me it highlights the questionable nature of all the information we are receiving about the conflict.
The IDF's youtube channel disturbed me as it's all action fully removed from context. It's just people talking about how someone is a terrorist with no proof. This blog makes a good point that the IDF makes mistakes (that's not to say that the red cross never does either!).
It made me think about many of the facts going on here. We hear all the time about Hamas missiles landing on Sderot. There are some issues around facts here:

Is Sderot an illegal settlement?
Was Hamas firing these before the ceasefire stopped?

Both sides of the conflict have different views as to the veracity of the claims above. It is quite interesting as it brings a point as to what valid data is and what it could look like. This is the kind of site that is talking to us about the attacks on Israeli soil. Al Jazeera is more than happy to report on what's happening to the Palestinians.
I'm not going to go anywhere near the question of what was at Sderot before Sderot arrived.
The problem is that people have very blinkered views as to what is going on. They all throw conspiracy style theories out about what's happening in the disputed areas. Video is about the only thing that can't easily be doctored (photos are very easy to change) but video robbed of context is problematic.

Traditionally us Brits have trusted the BBC, but in recent times most articles are simply rehashes of AP information about other people's reports. Even if they were in, both sides would be accusing the BBC of bias. American networks can't be trusted but neither can the Arabic ones. It's difficult, the only ones I really believe are the Chinese Media as I don't think they care either way...

For the internet, distrust of the media is actually a good thing as it will hopefully educate people to look at more than one source when investigating what's going on. This will increase the number of pages looked at and give us poor little media planners more choice in titles to use.

Unfortunately for media owners increased cross readership with other titles means that their site do not offer a unique readership and it makes it easier for us to 'buy around them'. In turn this will reduce the total number of potential outlets for news.

Internet Explorer users warned to change browser over security fears - Times Online

Internet Explorer users warned to change browser over security fears - Times Online: "A spokesman today estimated that one in 500 internet users had been affected."

1 in 500 is stupidly high when you've got billions of people using your system. This is the kind of thing that can actually destroy people's trust in the internet.

Hope they manage to solve this quickly. If more people switch browsers, we should see these sort of problems become less frequent - someone would have to find a way to compromise firefox, IE, chrome, opera and safari (plus numerous others) in order to get to 1 in 500. If there are 600 million internet users (a stat I remember seeing recently), then we're talking about 1.2 million people being compromised. That's stupidly huge.

I hope the spokesperson was just being wrong and meant that 1 in 500 may be affected...

Me being Slow

Founders of Google looking Geekys somewhere

It's taken me a long time, but I finally got around to reading the paper Google's founders wrote when they had their search engine up and running.
I haven't seen a similar example from any other startup where their actual process of starting up is written up in so much detail. Obviously it is still quite biased as it is an academic paper which will naturally try to talk up the achievements of the authors.
Just seeing what they did though does impress me. They came up with:

• The whole concept of crawlers
• A new way of storing files on disks
• A programme that could understand web pages
• The pagerank idea (and more importantly the implementation)
• Storing the index in a flexible manner
  

Much as we all hear about the company, it's very interesting to see how it all started. Right from the start they were looking to create a platform rather than just a search engine. Quite scary really.
Also interesting to see they wrote the initial crawler in Python. Been playing around with this recently and it's good to see the best in the business are using this too.

Pre Budget Report

Was quite pleased with the announcements yesterday. More tax on people earning stupidly large sums of money. Less VAT. Quite good really.
Only problem is that I can forsee having to make some custom changes to lots of random things in order to accomodate the changes.

Anyway. Here's a nice Wordle view of the speeches from Darling and Osborne.

Darling first:



As you can see he was talking about lots of rises and changes, hence percent becomes one of his bigger words. Most interesting is the use of the words 'Government', 'help' and 'support'. Pretty much gets his meaning across.

Mr. Osborne was slightly more negative:

Lots of the word Chancellor, which is quite standard for the nature of the House of Commons debating style. Lots of 'recession' and 'tax' in there. ALthough the policies have changed, it still Tories talking more about tax burdens and Labour talking about funding public services.

We'll see where things go in the future, but the most telling thing back was the best day for the FTSE 100 ever. Obviously Darling can't take full credit for that, but it definitely didn't do any harm.

A new Christmas

We are spending large amouts of time seeing bad news about the economy. It's still not clear if we're at a point where the economy is going to improve or if we're at a point where it's just going to continue to get worse.
The newspapers constantly serve us up news that tells us that things are going bad. The bank's own random surveys tell us that people are pessimistic about the future. Companies are laying off workers in their droves (according to reports) and hgue names are teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.
However the genuine figures I keep on seeing are not too bad at all. My clients are all going to spend more on online advertising next year. We are forecasting more internet sales. We are seeing problems from too much competition and the possibility that other people may be cutting prices more than us.
It's a confusing world. As deflation rears it's unknown head, we face an interesting world where the assumption goes from 'buy it now' to 'wait until it is cheaper'. That's not a world most marketers here have faced before. The usual immediacy message of 'SALE' is now not as effective.
We've been facing this problem with Christmas sales for the last couple of years - consumers have known that shops were going to cut prices towards the end of the season, and the shops have had to. This Christmas may see the first bucking of the trend.
Retailers have been pessimistic about their forecasts for Christmas this year. They worry that people will be stockpiling cash \ unable to lend for presents. This means they assume consumers will be spending less on Christmas. Shareholders are demanding that companies hang onto cash rather than investing it in stock. Therefore they haven't bought as much inventory as they normally do, meaning it is possible that shops will sell out.
What will happen then?
We won't see obscenely large January sales
We will see larger queues in shops
These two things will be fantastic for the retailers.
Lack of large January sales mean the retailers will hang onto more margin, making them more profitable businesses. This will in turn enhance shareholder confidence in them (something which is sorely lacking at the moment).
Larger queues in shops will be fantastic for me as it will encourage more people onto the internet. It will also be fantastic for shops as for once they will be able to recycle some urgency into their customers. There must come a point of 'sale fatigue' and I'm sure I've hit it. If I see a shop I like with a sale, I just don't bother popping in as I don't think it's siginficantly different from normal operation. I'm sure other customers are similar.

Overall a sold out Christmas (but not necessarily a good one in terms of total revenue for the shops) will improve matters on the high street. If they can't sell their inventory, expect January to be fantastic for bargain hunters, but the retailers will take a couple of years to recover.

New Things

I went to the Economist's Innovation Awards last night. It was held at the Science Museum, which was a fantastic venue for the awards - surrounded by random world changing inventions. They had a fondness for pointing out the world's first Telegraph machine, but there were lots of interesting props around the building.
Most award ceremonies I go to do not really award based on things that have a real impact. However this one did.
The winners also gave a little speech. Most of them, admittedly, were along the lines of 'thanks for the award but I couldn't be bothered to turn up'. One of the people who gave a proper speech was Jimmy Wales.
His point was that he didn't invent anything, he just used existing things in a new way and that's what innovation is. That's exactly what these awards were about. Thinking about it in this way, there's very few major world changing inventions that have come about in the last twenty years.
It's hard to think of any examples. The ones I would usually think of:

• Mobile Phones (more than twenty years old)
• LCD screens (more than twenty years old)
• Even the web is more than twenty years old (I'll take Mosaic as the starting point)
• Search is older than twenty years (Altavista was the start?)
• Hybrid cars are from the 70s

I suppose we could count Ajax or some rubbish like that, but those don't feel like things that have changed the world. Hopefully this lack of innovation is just due to the cycles involved in bringing new technology to consumers.

We're due something properly new. Hope it comes soon!

(image from Zinkwazi's photostream)

Burying the bad news

Home Retail warns of tougher times to come

I suspect we'll start seeing this kind of results reporting in the next couple of weeks. All the bad news companies have been burying for a while will suddenly come out with the bosses washing their hands and moaning about the current economic climate.

"Oh no, the business I bought for £900m is now worth less than half? Damn this credit crunch!"

Not my job to go through these reports but I suspect that there'll be a lot of extremely pessimistic write downs that will be miraculously turned into profits next year.

The Chief Execs who wrung their hands at the evil global markets today will then take all the credit for their cunning skills in turning their loss last year into huge profits. They'll then hit their targets and make loads of bonus money.


Good work if you can get it!

Bring on the feminists!

Bring on the feminists!
Originally uploaded by mild_swearwords

Like the way the Londonpaper describes these women as: 'some of the most influential women in the world'.

Mrs. Brown - influential because she is married to Mr. Brown
Mrs. Palin - influential because she got picked by John McCain
Wendy Deng - influentil because she married Rupert Murdoch

Where's Merkel? Pelosi?

Corporations Avoiding Tax

Was going through some old banking stuff today and found this old story:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/369b723e-6a52-11dd-83e8-0000779fd18c.html

Basically it's a story from an old FT article describing how Merrill managed to cook its books in such a way as to avoid paying tax for a couple of years.

Wonder what will happen now that Merill has been bought. Does this transfer so that Bank of America doesn't have to pay tax too?

Boring question I know, but I think we should find ways to stop letting the multinationals get away with this sort of cheating...

Am loving Gapminder at the moment

I love making these charts and playing with them. Check this one out:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pV6F9EDiLs6CD8ofaUKM7Fg

You can really see the deaths of HBOS and B&B come to life!

Don't know

The Canaries

For a long time I've accepted that the industry I work in carries a price for the interest and excitement we get from working in it. The ultimate issue is that we are the canaries of the economy. The first and easiest thing for any company to cut is their marketing budget.
While I am insulated to a significant degree by working on the internet which should remain relatively safe from the accountants, I do see a large amount of pain in the marketplace at the moment. This is particularly true for sites dedicated to brand advertising.
I was feeling guilty about the way we have been able to negotiate deals with them, driving huge discounts from the prices they usually quote. Having seen some of their ploys to get out of it (example: Telegraph), I'm not feeling so sorry.

We spend lots of time telling people not to compromise their brand for short term gain in these sorts of climate. The Telegraph sales team also tells people. They're not the only ones. We'll see more editorial integrity go down the toilet in the short term.

Looking forward to seeing the Economist's celebrity column...

Obama vs McCain

Have been playing with Google Spreadsheets. This is a look at the marketplace between McCain and Obama within the Iowa Electronic Markets. I was playing with the GapMinder button to see what we can make the data look like.

I think it looks good, I think I could make some good charts for my presentations with it, but I suspect it would have to be within the Google set of stuff rather than in a 'proper presentation'.

New Acrobat Site

This is quite exciting. I like the fact the font is called 'Minion'. Might try and use this to send stuff to people as I don't think Adobe owns any companies that I would regard as direct competitors.

Can't see an easy way to use Styles though, and I do find that one of the things within Word that is actually well implemented. You'd have thought Adobe's record of Illustrator, Indesign and Photoshop would mean that they'd be concentrating on the whole design aspect.

Would be interested in seeing some functions that aren't in Word. However as a free alternative, can't complain too much!

I think it does succeed in looking nicer than Google's offering, but I'm pretty sure this is less easy to use. Maybe if they manage to include some way of doing a tie up with Yahoo! so that Doc files automatically come here, they might see some traction. Also needs to look at using Facebook connect so that people don't necessarily have to mess around trying to find ways to sign up to it. It's still quite easy to sign into, but I don't see it as being particularly fun. Another login added to the huge host of ones I have!

Google Website Trends

2008-06-21_1137
Originally uploaded by mild_swearwords

Noticed that Google have changed their trends project to include websites.
This is a really good move as it gives us access to numbers that aren't solely based on Comscore or Hitwise's slightly suspect methodologies.
However Google haven't been entirely transparent about their own.
The above little bit of the graph shows the other sites that people visit from the Guardian.
The most interesting bit is that the site that's most visited is atldmt.com. This is due to iframe tags that must sit somewhere on the Guardian, serving people's ads from Atlas.
This shows some of the technology that Google is using. If they were collecting data purely from searches, they would not see this. The only way they could know that people were receiving traffic from atldmt.com would be if they were tracking where people went through some kind of tool that intercepted and monitored their webtraffic.
Now just look on your own explorer window and see if you have the google toolbar. If you have it, you've got a little friend who could be reporting all your web views back to Google central.
Google do disclose the fact that they monitor 'anonymous usage statistics'. The fact that they also track other websites that you visit means that they are keeping hold of who is who and also keeping a history of your web browsing.
This data is now easily and quickly searchable within the trends interface. It won't be long before they're offering me ways to target you through the adsense platform.
There'll be an uproar when that does happen, but I strongly suspect there's a beta test looking at how it works right now.

Music

“When music fans can say, ‘I have all the music from 1950-2010, do you want a copy?’ — what kind of business models will be viable in such a reality?”

Nice quote from one of the founders of the piratebay.
He has a very good point though. Music is now worthless. More music exists than you could possibly listen to. Why should you buy new music?
Before we go off into "freeconomics", it should be remembered that the rights-holders have an incentive to maximise their profits. They want to preserve the status quo.
its a little like DVDs. A cheaper way to distribute films comes along, so they nark prices up. Downloading is no different.
Last-fm offers a zero cost distribution platform coupled with a zero cost Marketing platform. Problem for the record companies is that the profit will be lower due to lower revenue per recording.
My opinion is that the recording companies need to appreciate they need much lower costs in order to operate in the new Environment. Why employ salespeople to sell something that is individually worthless?

Google Health

Went to a presentation on Friday that included the phrase:
"The battleground will be over our data"

Google are definitely continuing the offensive. Here's Google Health. Why not trust google with the details of your various illnesses? Allow Google to know what's wrong with you and then serve you ads in relation to this.

Google say:
"Certain features of Google Health can be used in conjunction with other Google products, and those features may share information to provide a better user experience and to improve the quality of our services. For example, Google Health can help you save your doctors’ contact information into your Google Contact List."

At the moment Google place our adverts against words that are not necessarily relevant to what we are bidding against. This means that Google is using it's own information to decide that the ad is relevant. If you are an advertiser, you can see the results of this within the query report contained within adwords. There will be some words you appear against that are not remotely relevant.

We discovered this working for a previous client whereby we were appearing against competitor's keywords despite the fact we'd never entered bids against those keywords.

I suspect Google Health will allow Google to begin putting these adverts in front of people who will be searching on related terms, but will give Google a justification to put more specialised ads (with higher effective CPMs) in front of people who it knows will have an interest in the relevant drug \ product.

It's cunning, but if people don't realise what Google are doing, they will never notice. The perfect crime? We'll see.

In general, the public will happily exchange their privacy for specific benefits. This case shows a good example where the public are merrily engaged in this exchange.

Poor Gordon

The Economist has done a particularly good cover this week. One of those times where a picture does say a good number of words!

7p per gigabyte

The internet moves ever onward. As many of the commentators are beginning to point out, we are moving inexorably towards a point where storage of data and computing power are essentially free.

The fact that developers are being offered storage at this sort of price indicates that we will see more and more things being stored all over the place. Why store something on your PC hard drive, where it is vulnerable to corruption when you can store it online too?

Apple's time machine product has shown that consumers can see the benefit of having a well designed backup solution. I suspect it won't be very long before we'll be seeing a similar product that backs up your data online and then serves you adverts based around the content that you are uploading.

As with all other products along these lines, we will be seeing some people moaning about their loss of privacy. However I think the majority of the population will be willing to sacrifice privacy for ease of use.

I would be willing to put a bet on that we will see a consumer friendly version of time machine appearing on the internet reasonably soon. The question is how deep they'll be willing to go with their profiling of users.

New Buzz Measurement Tool

Really nice little tool from facebook mimics Google trends. However the facebook one analyses comments and wall posts across the entire facebook platform.

Shows the command facebook have over their data. If they are able to develop this further we will be starting to see targeting of their ads getting tighter and tighter.

Already we expect to be able to target web users based on the interests they have implicitly shown by visiting particular categories of sites. Soon I'm sure a network will find a way to link information with sites like facebook.

It isn't far way at all as Drive are already offering a combination of targeting through linking their network inventory with your messenger \ msn profile. This is a very effective development as the infomration contained within the msn profiles has been shown to be quite true.

Yahoo's purchase of Blue Lithium means that they will probably find a way to copy Drive and implement the same kind of targeting based on Yahoo profiles.

Imagine what would be possible if one of the social networking sites went out and bought a network - facebook's user data being exploited across the internet!

I think once the general public know the extent of the data we use, there will be a small outcry. Although debates are being had about the ways in which we use personal data, it does seem to have gotten to silly levels.

Inspiring Little Piece

Really nice little piece. Think it could change earlier as the delivery is reasonably flat.

AARP did the ad which is why the voice is a rather annoying sounding Yank...
From Serendipity Book

Neutral Reporting

Good old Journos continue to work hard in order to find stories. Will be fun to see who actually posted this up. Could be practically any of them.

Actually an interesting site that hosts it: Starnow.

This is the kind of site that takes a good niche and exploits it. At the moment some little (very little) publicity and PR agents will take people suffering family crises and try to sell the story. Someone at my old job appeared in the Sun talking about their allergy to Essex (actually to pollen but there we go).

Glad the internet has made it easier for these people to go direct without any evil PR people between!

Beautiful

Microsoft throws in the towel on search?

Interesting looking picture from the setup of the new internet explorer from Microsoft. One would have thought that the main way MS would try to make money from any new internet explorer would be by integrating their search as closely as possible to the browser.
This way they could make money from the inevitable sponsored links that would be clicked on. They would also create some loyalty with their search engine by doing this. One would hope that their search engine is good enough that some people would become enamoured of the search engine after using it.
Maybe they do realise that the majority of the early adopters use Google (and probably firefox). They have incorporated some functionality that will allow firefox users to download their bookmarks and all the rest of it.
Still, seems interesting to see some Microsoft people admitting that they have essentially lost the search wars. Spending more of their time and money on their display side (especially messenger) would be more profitable. Also it may make more sense if they are buying Yahoo! as even Yahoo! currently has more market share than windows live search.
Might give IE8 a go tomorrow, though I suspect it'll make all our IE based systems not work. Was very disappointed to find both Atlas and Adazzle don't support firefox. Also was disappointed at the number of popups involved in the various systems I'm using. Where's some kind of workflow engineering!

Funding Content

An announcement was made today saying that content makers were going to be given a share of Google's advertising revenue from the advertising that appears within the videos they made. This definitely sounds like the beginning of something new.

At the moment the whole revenue structure of all kind of video broadcasting \ hosting relies on the media owner purchasing content and then displaying it to their audience. The content maker takes risk in creating the content, but the media owner takes more risk in deciding to use it on their own media platforms.

This model makes sense when the available media space is limited. A TV channel can only cope with a couple of hours worth of prime time content. They have a limited number of hours in which to show their content. This means they have to choose the best possible editorial in order to keep their audience (and therefore money).

Another factor in broadcaster's favour is that they are the ones who employ a sufficiently large salesforce in order to be able to effectively sell their audience to advertisers. Individual content producers will never be able to profitably employ a decent size salesforce.

The new media model however allows the creation of some disruptive businesses. Youtube has the potential to make themselves one of these. Google has invested heavily in their salesforce and can therefore sell their own audience extremely effectively. Youtube is now offering content providers the benefits of their salespeople.

Although the old model had an indirect link between audience size and reward to the content creator, the new model has a direct link. This should allow the content creators to put more time and thought into how relevant they can make the programmes to their actual audience, rather than to the broadcaster's impression of their own audience.

I'm sure more companies will pop up that will give content creators better deals than youtube. They are also going to have to fight against the old dinosaurs who are falling over themselves to shout about the technical abilities of their new platforms.

Media fragmentation is going to get even sillier as people watch different media at different times. The only effective mechanism of supplying them with the ads they want (in order to make the media free) will be through an automated sales team. Selling hundreds of channels will be difficult for our poor overworked sales reps. We're going to need a computer to do it.

Our only hope is that someone will invent a decent system for this before Google gets there.

Blogs Alive, Kicking and Growing

All the reviews I've seen of 2007 seem to feature facebook rather strongly. This is probably quite accurate as they did have a pretty fantastic year. This time last year people thought facebook would be worth about $1Billion now many seem happy with a valuation around $12Billion. If the valuation was proportional to newspaper articles it would be even higher.

Before the newspapers begin knocking down the poster boy they tried to build up, how about the poor little kid who got completely ignored during the 'social revolution' of 2007?

Poor little blogs were pretty much written off at the start of last year. Many news sources were showing that hte number of new blogs being created was slowing, the number of people posting on the already created blogs was also reducing.

This much was probably true. What people weren't looking at, however, was the number of people READING these blogs.

In terms of absolute gains, Wordpress have had a fantastic year. Their traffic figures, according to Comscore, have rocketed up by about 700%. The y axis is thousands of monthly unique users:


The growth has been consistent throughout the year, bringing Wordpress into the top 30 in terms of UK traffic. All this traffic is looking at the hundreds of thousands of blogs within wordpress.

It's not just Wordpress though, Blogger has also had a fantastic year with steady and consistent traffic growth. Guido Fawkes' intrusion into the national consciousness last year was one of the many blogger blogs to actually make it into the mainstream in the UK.


The thing about all these blogs is that they are fragmented. Their branding is minimal and focused towards people who want to write rather than design. Therefore it is quite easy for them to sneak under the radar. Blogger can easily slip through as most industry metrics tool will aggregate the blogger listings into Google's.

The stats themselves paint a picture of blogs as being in extremely good health, quietly increasing their traffic and readership. I'm sure at some point someone will figure out how to make a large amount of money out of them and then start shouting about it. Wordpress and Blogger could definitely make some money out of the page impressions they see in front of them, but they may then lose many users. It's always going to be tough.

Would be interesting to see how many blogs with actual traffic feature adwords or equivalent on them. It may also be possible that many of the blogs are actually affiliate sites taking advantage of the free hosting.

Whatever the answer to the above questions the blogging sites are succeeding in growing their traffic so one has to assume that a decent level of interest exists.

This growth is against static growth for the major established opinion providers such as the Guardian. I think I need to do some graphs that will show the number of sites people look at has grown.

Belong

Great advert. Really shows what a bit of imagination (plus regulation) can do. Would be good to see some stats on beer market share to see how these guys have done since the new lots of beer.

Don't think BMB will win an award but hopefully they've done something to the sales.

Perfection in an ad

Really can't fault this ad:



This is exactly what we're talking about when we talk about measuring engagement and all the rest of it.

The wonderful thing about working for a good brand is that they have some kind of feedback effect. The better the brand is perceived, the more good things you can do with it.

If this was tried for any of innocent's competitors, it wouldn't feel the same. Somehow the overall good feeling for the innocent product keeps on flowing for this particular ad.

IF you think about it for a couple of minutes you can think of objections to the actual product - is the fruit organic? Is it actually that healthy for you to have this concentrated does of fruit?

It doesn't matter though because the feeling of healthiness they've injected into purchasing the product overcomes any rational objection. Even the price!

Good work by whoever did it. Will have to find out who's covering them.

Great Advert

Haven't seen the ad in the UK, and it does use the UK only name for it.

Follow up from this one which I do remember seeing:



BBH continue to do good work. Shame they didn't feature a gorilla!

The Voucher Codes are Spreading

The Guardian seems to be finally picking up on a trend that has been expanding this Christmas.

Vouchers are really coming into their own as a form of luring customers to a store. It remains to be seen whether they are effective at really making the stores money, but I think there's definitely been a higher profile accorded to the stores which have put time and effort into pushing these discounts.

The problem with vouchers and discounts is that they product some problems further down the line. A shop's "hero" products are generally ones that are heavily in demand. These will sell out and make the retailer a tidy profit whether they discount them or not. With discount vouchers these products will disappear quickly and at a discount, whereas the products which are usually discounted towards the end of a season will still be there.

However some of the discount codes are structured in better ways - enforcing a minimum spend is one effective way of doing this. Although the retailer probably loses out in terms of margin, the minimum spend makes sure the revenue stays at a decent level.

Another argument for the voucher codes is that it attracts new customers, some of whom will hopefully become regular shoppers. This will always be true but some would question if a discounted sale is really the best way to begin a relationship with a consumer.

One problem we are experiencing on the internet is that some affiliates are exploiting these codes mercilessly. Retailers already pay their affiliates a commission from sales. If the customer also uses a voucher code the sales that are driven may actually become unprofitable. Even more problems arise if the merchant's tracking system doesn't allow you to know if the affiliate's sales used voucher codes.

Overall voucher codes are a good thing for the internet as it makes people spend more time online before shopping and puts an incentive into them doing a bit of research before going out into the streets. The question is whether the discounts do anything actually useful or valuable for the retailer. I don't think it does.

Picture stolen from ewar_woowar's photostream

What You Can Fit in a Page These Days

Was having a quick think about what the next thing is likely to be. I think we're going to see lots of effort being put into making our lives easier. I think what we will see may get called 'RSS 2.0'.
The main thing is that we will see more things stripped of their context. One of the ideas behind 'Web 2.0' was that text can be separated into content and formatting. I think this year we will see this extended into websites. The basic idea behind a website is that you go there and get a service. Many content based sites are becoming familiar with the idea that they can still make money if they allow people to know what content is on their site before they go there.
This will be extended across all the other web services. Email, Social Networking and other things I can't think of right now will fit into the RSS model. I think someone (probably someone new) will come along this year with an RSS reader that is easy to use.
The problem with RSS as it exists at the moment is that it's complicated. Hopefully someone will find a way of making it simple. This will definitely help things along. One stat I would like to see is how many people are actually using RSS. It's not something that will come through the advertising we do, it's something the publishers need to start telling us.
Many of the new businesses getting funding at the moment are focused around the idea of altering webpages that already exist. This is particularly focused on facebook apps at the moment, but the open application platform will allow them to be extended across other sites. All of the major companies have now setup platforms from which portable applications can be delivered (facebook, Yahoo!, Google and Apple). Mozilla is also working on Prism, a browser which will make some webapps indistinguishable from normal applications. The web will creep further into people’s lives.
Basically by the end of this year there will be a program or web service which will exploit this. It will be able to tell you what appointments you have that day, what the headlines are across all the media you regularly read, who’s poked you on facebook, what your favourite band have done on Myspace and which of your TV shows is on tonight. This is all possible with existing technology right now, we just need someone to make this popular.
If the privacy debate doesn’t really happen we will be technically able to deliver adverts for beer to someone who is going to the pub tonight or shampoo to a girl who is staying in to wash her hair.
More sites will use the portability of aggregator sites to make new revenue streams, we should get used to things like the Sun’s deal with Brand Alley and all the major portals’ deals with Uswitch and Moneysupermaket. There isn’t going to be a place to hide from being sold to.

If you are genuinely interested in getting told about deals to do with what you want, advertisers aren’t going to wait for you to check your email – they will tap into your widgets on your desktop. The amount of integration possible between sites and programmes will mean that the line between spyware and legitimate advertising will blur. There will be some fun levels of targeting possible and we need to be ready to exploit it as soon as it comes out.
Should be fun playing around with all the new toys that come along. As always it'll be a good couple of months before anyone does anything with them!

Title Image shamelessly stolen from wonder wombat's photostream

Anchorman Fest

Went to a fantastic event last night. It was called the Anchormanfest. It was exactly what we wanted. People were dressed as appropriate characters from the film. There was also bowling. Scotch was also available which probably explains why my head hurts a little right now. It's impressive how much of an impact Anchorman has had on popular culture. It's kind of the 'life of brian' for our age. Although Blades of Glory came close to Anchorman I don't think it had the same level of effect. I know very few people who are still quoting those films. Anchorman lead me onto many other films from Ferrell and co. I think it could easily be used as the basis for a viral, if we could get clearance. Sent from my iPhone

Polar Sympathy

The polar bear does seem to be generating lots of sympathy at the moment, and this sympathy is being ruthlessly exploited.

It's a nice marketing ploy to get people to sponsor animals. Nice and fluffy and able to look amazingly cute. This works as a device to get people to donate money.

The ad above plays on all of this to get people to sponsor an animal. Great interactive way to get people to pick up on the message that climate change is making things worse for many animals across the globe. I do think Attenborough should get some credit for the original idea for this advert, but I doubt he'll get it!

The thing that gets me though is that the website doesn't explain how you adopt a polar bear. You pay at least £2.50 a month in order to "adopt" it. What does this mean?

In my own thoughts you can't own a wild animal. Once it is owned it is a domestic animal, though admittedly it doesn't automatically become tame. If you adopt it, does it stop being wild (and therefore an illegitimate target for the world wildlife fund)?

If it isn't adopted, how do you know which animal is being looked after for you? What do they do for it?

I think the gift pack is a good idea and I'm sure the donation will be useful to the WWF, but the advertising is slightly misleading because your money is not going to the specific cause that you would expect from the naming of the product.

Of course I am getting my information from a cursory inspection of their website, but this website should be their opportunity to show how much work goes into caring for each of the 'adoptees' and it doesn't.

Overall it's a great advert but I think they could have been more open about what the money is actually going towards.

amapedia home page

amapedia home page

Brilliant idea by Amazon.

They've setup their own version of Wikipedia that seems to revolve around the products within their site. They've cunningly put it on a fully separate domain from their shops.

The trick is that they now get two listings within Google. One for their shop and one for their 'nice' site explaining all about the book but not in a "selly" way.

Of course it has nice convenient links for you to go and buy it on Amazon no matter what you write in the copy.

It'll be interesting to see if any companies copy it. It'll be difficult to get the critical mass to push some content into it, but getting two places on the top page in Google is definitely worth it.

More Vouchers = Bad Christmas

Gap warns consumers over hoax email vouchers - Brand Republic News - Brand Republic

Brand Republic ran a stroy this morning about some fake vouchers which were floating out there in the online world.

There seems to be a growing surge of online vouchers floating around. In the last week I've had vouchers forwarded to me from GAP, Selfridges, Carnaby Street and Wagamamas. The many newspapers are mentioning people like Threshers.

I remember reading about couponing in a business book. It's all about identifying people who are willing to pay but are put off by high prices. Give them a relatively difficult but straightforward means of obtaining a discount and they'll buy. The effort these people go through then means that the free spending people who wanted the product at the higher price anyway still pay full price. Hey presto, everyone's happy.

The problem is when too many of the high spending people get a hold of the discount voucher. The internet makes it very easy for vouchers \ promotional codes to be spread around in areas where the retailer or producer doesn't necessarily want them to be. Before you know it a discount meant for friends and family appears all over town.

Obviously the majority of retailers will put some crafty T&Cs on the voucher to ensure that they don't end up bankrupting themselves with this sort of offer. However the customer experience in this sort of situation will be quite bad. You've gotten the consumer's hopes up and then dashed them.

Branding considerations also need to come into play. It's nice to see your brand being sought after, but people shouldn't perceive your product as cheap or a bargain (unless you're talking about Tesco Basic). A brand's value is in two things: Amount of people who want it and the amount people will pay for it. Apple's trick is not just the fact that everyone wants their products, it's also the fact that they're willing to pay almost twice as much as the nearest competitor.

Most retailers are fully aware of the potential risks involved with giving out these voucher codes. The current vouchers available show the fact that retailers are a little more worried about Christmas than normal.

All shops have something to gain by saying that Christmas will be bad (helps lower expectations for their quarterly reporting and allows them to not look greedy over the christmas period) but they very rarely do anything about this pessimism until later in the season. This season people seem to be slashing all over the place before all the decorations have gone up.

Good thing is that if they're desparate now, they'll be more desparate later. Might be worth postponing the Christmas shop!

Threadless: No Longer Rootless

Threadless: From Clicks to Bricks

Threadless are opening a store. Can't think of many other situations where an online retailer has opened a real world shop...

I'm sure there are examples - I can imagine many family stores started life as an eBay shop. I just like the way the Article talking about this in Business Week made it sound really hard and difficult!

Web retailers are often unprepared for the costs of running a store, including rent, payroll, and utilities.

These sound suspicously similar to the bland pronouncements from the usual crew of consultants and 'experts' cooked up for this kind of article.

Do they seriously imagine that people won't realise they have to pay rent on a shop? That staff are free? That no-one will charge them for electricity?

While I know some people are a bit stupid you'd think by the time someone is successfully running an $11 million dollar business they might know how to pay rent.

The guy being quoted, Jim Okamura manages the Chicago office of a "Global Retail Consultancy". I bet he charges a good amount per hour. I wonder how much he would charge for that advice.

It's all based on his

Jim has 14 years of consulting experience focused on the retail industry, including strategic planning, branding, consumer behavior and multi-channel project work.

I imagine those 14 years have been well spent.

The Value of Digital Citizenship

I am a firm believer in the existence of a Digital Community. I think that both people and companies who make their living on the internet owe something to the great beast that has spawned so much in the past ten or fifteen years.
Some of the things I do, of which this blog is the main thing, is contribute small amounts of content to the overall beast, in the hope that it will one day prove useful to somebody browsing on the internet. The vast majority of people on the internet are using it for benevolent purposes and I believe you have to trust in the good intent of that majority.
I saw an interesting idea today. If a website has been setup to defame your brand (example), it is possible to find ways to make that website disappear from Google.
The company who came up with the idea were strongly advising against this rather extreme tactic, but it got me thinking.
The problem is that most brands and brand managers want to control their brand on the internet. That doesn't work anymore. You make a brand and then release it to the public through advertising. Now it used to be that the only feedback people got about your brand was from their friends, the media and your adverts. Now there are many regularly visited places that can give people independent views of brands and companies.
This has spawned whole movements above and beyond those that used to plague nestle - the amount of effort to setup the movements has decreased hugely so the number of movements has increased. Mild hate campaigns can be setup with ease and spread quickly across a whole host of forums and social networks on the web.
In the face of this, many executives will ban any use of their brand, company or even logo in anything that could conceivably end up out of their direct control. This is silly. If you want people to actually take some time to build a relationship with your brand, you need to show them that you trust them. You need to give them the opportunity to complain. You need to be happy to show people that you are an open company.
Obviously you need to address the moaning, but that's the point. Letting the moaning happen is not a choice. Stopping the moaning is very difficult. Putting your prices up will never be a decision welcomed by your customers, but it's sometimes necessary. Explaining why the prices have gone up will help your cause. Explaining why powdered breast milk can sometimes be useful for parents will help.
Letting people make their own minds up is something that brave brands do because brave brands are confident that they have the best product. Trying to control the conversation is something that brands do when they have something to fear. If you have a problem ask for ideas from your customers. Show them that you listen.
Bit rambling. I think I've made my point, but I don't know what it was.

Facebook didn't kill the internet!

Facebook's Big Ad Plan: If Users Like You, They'll Be Your Campaign - Advertising Age - Digital

AdAge report from the press conference where Facebook touted their new ideas.

Beyond the simple things (that Bebo have already been doing) around making sponsored profiles, Facebook are doing something that's actually interesting to marketers and to facebookers. The idea of being able to tell your friends when you've listed something on eBay should be quite useful - extending the reach of personal advertising of this kind.

The idea of Amazon reviews being posted onto facebook is useful too - this is a true use of an opensocial schema. The idea behind it seems to be that facebook should act as a node \ aggregator in the parsing of internet data about our friends. If facebook is notified that you have posted something to the internet (that you are willing to share), facebook will then inform your friends. Facebook sees it's role as combining Twitter, Blogger, MySpace, Amazon and eBay into a navigable interface.

Should be interesting to see how many people facebook can get to use this system. I think this will be of most interest to the smaller retailers who will get the chance to let people know that people shop there. IF you see that your friends are shopping somewhere, you will trust the shop more and therefore hopefully buy from them.

Might be an interesting way of growing some of the smaller players on the internet.

Old Guardian Stuff

Nice ad from the Guardian proving their ethical credentials (and also showing off their reasonably comprehensive archive).

I'm surprised there's little been done by the whole historical crowd to pull out and aggregate this data. I'm sure Google will get there at some point quite soon...

Ad Tracking Rebellion

Uh - Oh!

The idea that advertisers can target people's behaviour on the internet has allowed many companies to become big. The size of the tracking has been increasing in recent months. There are rumours that facebook's new ad announcement on Tuesday will involve a large degree of tracking consumer's behaviour across other sites.

This will definitely rile the privacy advocates, who will be quite disturbed by the idea that facebook's database will be usable across the whole of the internet. The privacy controversy will deter some people from using facebook as much.

It should be interesting to see what evolves from this. Trust is an extremely important thing for social networks - we share a large amount of data with our social network providers. Although many people are willing to share the data with literally everyone, even more people want to limit the data sharing and control where it ends up. How many facebook profiles are shared with everyone?

I don't actually know what the data says but I'd bet that a good proportion are not shared.

I personally believe that facebook is going to come up with a funky way to advertise on their own site. If they do propose an external network model, we'll see some problems arising for many of the other companies that use almost any kind of behavioural targeting.

One quick look at the largest networks reveals many of them collecting large amounts of information on people using cookies. Tacoda (now owned by AOL), Blue Lithium (Yahoo), Adviva and many others will be exposed. Already around 8% of webusers employ some kind of cookie deletion software or some kind of cookie blocker. Increases in this will not make our job any more fun.

Google will remain smugly aloof (at least until they own Doubleclick!) as their model relies entirely on ads relevant to searches, not who the people are.

Sony slowly getting there

Sony Gets It Right. The New PS3 Ad. « Agency Spy

Rather than focusing on a brand that is rather mysterious, Sony are finally shouting about the features of their box of tricks.


Still not sure they've quite beaten the gears of war ad that the Xbox 360 had earlier in the year - that one definitely did something different for me. I think the Gears of War ad was the first time I considered that the new generation of consoles were doing something other than having slightly better looking graphics.



Ultimately, the success of a console depends on getting good games. I don't think the console makers have done enough to produce exclusive games as of yet. Not having GTA IV exclusively will hurt Sony, and Helo 3 boosts the Xbox. Heavenly Sword looks rather generic beat em up and I am yet to see a game on the PS3 that I actually want to play.

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...