The Future of TV and Addressable Advertising

Interesting conjecture on what the future of TV will look like, and sooner rather than later!  From AdAge.com today:

"It's conceivable—and probably inevitable—that TV/web convergence will lead to us ordering up movies, pizza and even advertising while watching custom-tailored content and interacting with social-network buddies at the same time."

And a related article about my personal favourite topic, addressable advertising, in this case via addressable TV: http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=140740

Video Advertising Isn't Going Away, It's Just 'Growing Up" Online...

As I've posted before in "TV Ads are Going to Fragment," more evidence from eMarketer, as if we needed it, demonstrating that the creation of video advertising isn't dead, or even in decline -- we were just waiting for the bandwidth and delivery systems to get up to speed.

Online ads with 'rich media' get almost double the 'dwell time' (watching time):

My point is only that the technology is finally sufficiently advanced that agencies can now get really creative (see the Mac vs. PC video display ads) and truly engage websurfers with video that "pulls".

What this suggests is that all those 'digital agencies' and 'experiential agencies' who have been largely executional in what they produce to date are either now going to have to step-up their creativity (AND strategic planning/thinking capabilities) with the type of Creatives the dinosaurs have traditionally employed, or will get stuck with executing what the dinosaurs feed them, as the latter see the opportunity and begin generating rich media ads to play online.

We're at the tipping point, the next big change that is about to get figured out is how to monetize the placement of rich media ads to the point where agencies can once again make the big bucks they used to from TV ad placement (15% of the media spend).  I think the winners are going to be the agencies who "get it" and walk away from the old broken commission model, accept less repetition, MUCH lower frequency rates, and MUCH, MUCH lower revenue from media.  These winners will focus on convincing clients to adopt a 'shared risk, shared up-side' model based on a low retainer up-front and a big payout if ROI metrics demonstrate higher sales due to their efforts.

For this to transpire, however, it will take either a combined effort amongst the oligarchs (WPP, Omnicom, Publicis and IPG), which is unlikely, or at least a risk-taking push by one of them to be the leader.  If they don't, the upstarts may just leapfrog past them and their relegation to 'dinosaur status' will be complete.

Wow. Ashton Kutcher et al Might Just Have Done It...

Comment on Fast Company to Ellen McGirt's piece on Ashton Kutcher's Katalyst Media mash-up, a social media effort that is making money.


What needs to be recognized here is the pragmatism that some, very few, actually, of the members of Kutcher's generation possess. What we're seeing ad infinitum is not just what he speaks to in saying "...and they say, 'I'm not worried about monetization yet,' that scares the shit out of me," but that this particular guy has always been about the monetization (via fame/personal brand-building). He's like a Madonna, always chasing the next thing that people are going to pay money for. That stands in direct contrast to the tail-end "Gen X'ers" and fledgling "Millennials" entering the workforce or just now beginning to enter middle-management. Due to the human failings we're all prey to, they were brought up being 'special' to the point where making money isn't anywhere near as important as self-fulfillment, or self-aggrandizement (their tendency to believe everyone, including the C-Suite, are entitled to their worldly opinions). This is a group who is currently touring the world, writing books and speaking to each other at literally THOUSANDS of 'conferences' touting "SOCIAL MARKETING," a discipline that, by its own definition, being 'social,' is not a marketing-appropriate medium any more than telemarketing's intrusion on our personal space via a social medium is. This vast posse of self-back-patting "social media as the second coming" enthusiasts, evangelists and advocates are touting the shift of a VERY significant slice of media mix dollars to a realm that has ZERO demonstrable ROI (not that I'm against experimentation or investing in media that can't prove ROI -- TV never would have survived had demonstrable ROI been demanded of it). The point is that, by experimenting himself and carefully researching and innovating within not just one tactic, but looking for viable ways to provide advertisers like Nestle, Pepsi and Kellogg with real value (not just impressions, but strategically on-brand-message entertaining content). Katalyst is doing what NO ONE, especially not HULU, has done, create a cross-platform mash-up that is actually working to create "Marketing 3.0," much more than the mere evolutionary step that was "Marketing 2.0": the shift from push to pull, from telling to listening and engaging. This is a very big deal. Kudos to a guy who is visionary enough to keep thinking, working and experimenting until he can make everyone money in the process. Banging the Drum on a Single Media Tactic Won't Work post: http://tinyurl.com/yhlllte

The Narrowing of Reach

Comment to Ed Castillo's POV on MediaBizBloggers: "Strategy is Sacrifice"

Ed, succinctly put, although your point of view flies in the face of the status quo 'push marketing' model we all grew up with.

What you're really speaking to, and it is a earth-shaking change for our industry, is that The Death of Frequency has brought about the corresponding narrowing of reach. What I mean is that with less repetition of our messages being demanded by consumers, we need to sacrifice broad reach (increase TOM awareness, trial and loyalty with all women 18-79) for narrow niche targets that a brand 'owns' in a much deeper way than we've attempted to do in the past.

"Pull marketing" requires a very profound, though simple, shift in our strategic approach to marketing efforts.

While Broadcast & Cable Battle for $, Rome Burns

Comment posted on MediaBizBloggers to Simon Applebaum's update on the revenue battle (fee for carriage) going on in the US:

Great update on the battle, Simon, but I cannot help but feel like we are all watching dinosaurs fighting each other for a slices of a rapidly shrinking pie. Kind of like watching music industry execs committing hundreds of thousands of dollars to suing middle class individuals for file sharing while iTunes continues to drain off most of their revenue.

I've been watching a new generation, my now 14 year old nephew, spend literally his entire weekend's leisure time watching hours and hours of short format videos on YouTube, in addition to watching a movie at the cinema and another on DVD on my flat screen, plus spending about 25% of his time playing video games. And this has been the case FOR TWO YEARS. He spends only about 5-10% of his time watching teen shows or cartoons on broadcast/cable TV. He tells me this is true of all his friends/classmates.

We have already witnessed "The Death of Frequency" (a strategic revolution in advertising that only Apple and Lee Clow have picked up on thus far) and we're now seeing a gradually more rapid shift in where the masses are spending their leisure time, and it is not on watching TV. TV ad prices went up 400% in the past 20 years and continue to rise even as viewership declines.  There's a race on to wring as much as possible out of TV advertising revenue that will inevitably speed up marketers rejection of the medium as they find much more cost-effective and user-appreciated media to buy into.

It's a very strange sensation to be sitting out here watching the battles rage between Spinosaurus and Giganotosaurus while several generations of viewers are busy building a new entertainment platform over them that will sooner, rather than later, consign their dominance to history. Broadcast and cable TV will not vanish anytime soon, but it will fragment as the bulk of the revenue stream evaporates.

In a period measured in months, not years, average young people will be watching content on Bluetooth projection glasses streaming from their smartphone and on their netbook/tablets. The pipeline will be the Internet, whether there's a ad-supported business model for it or not.

Something Devastating's About to Transform Social Media's Credibility

In an AdAge article today "P&G, Walmart, Unilever, General Mills Are Major Marketers on a Mission -- From 'We Save You Money' to 'We Nourish Lives,' Giants Make Some Big Statements", we can see the 'confluence' of some key trends in marketing from the past decade:

• Cause-related core brand missions (ideally strategically appropriate/relevant for each brand). 
• "Web 2.0" listening/sharing/engaging/inclusion tactics that treat consumers as empowered partners in brand-building.  
• The leveraging (although still at an experimental, let's-see-what-we'll-still-be-able-to-use-credibly-one-year-from-now stage) of the newest, emerging 'social media' tactics/technology. 

This is great news!  It's quite a celebratory moment in marketing history!  The industry's most visionary leaders embraced change and are moving the herd in a new direction.  Yet at the same time, something else is going on that stands in direct contrast to these positive movements.

One of the most insidious, but potentially devastating 'movements' we are witnessing is the growing push to alter the nature of the Web 2.0 emerging media "social" universe, changing it from unbiased, un-manipulated user-generated content (blogs, tweets, comments, wall-posts, etc.) to 'compensation for positive brand mentions'.  This new 'paid-for' vs. 'earned' crowd-sourcing model is creeping in via "The Viral Loop" (evaluating the 'value' of each Facebook user's contributions to Facebook's shareholders) and the excited anticipation of a young generation who 'live online' that they're going to get-rich-quick by simply mentioning brands in their daily communication: "The Futurist: Let the Games Begin, by Brian Van Eerden" in which the young author sees a future evolving that will feature:

"The seamless integration of social media and gaming makes it even easier to spend hours hooked into the system. The credits generated from my branded avatar are a welcome supplement, as well as the conversation tracker that pays for each time I make a brand reference with friends. "

Facebook's recent decision:

"To help marketers boost their reach on Facebook, the company has added an option that lets companies advertise to friends of their brand fans on the social network."

posted on Thursday, plus a raft of similar announcements from various emerging media all looking for ways to monetize their businesses, means that, insidiously, Rupert Murdoch's insistence that the world of professional (and profit-making) journalism is not dead and will find a successful business model online is going to prove to be correct.  Why?  Because there are a number of 'universal human truths' that are coming into play:

1. Greed will push individuals to grab for the brass ring and accept payments for positive brand mentions.
2. Greed for profits and power to control the conversations about their brands will push corporations to offer such payments (if this leads to the death of credibility of crowd-sourcing and the long tail, so much the better for the media industry!).
3. Skepticism and cynicism will drive people to no longer believe anything they read online from so-called unbiased private sources, especially as regulations begin to pressure the majority of user-generated content providers to acknowledge receipt of payments (once a few do, all become suspect).
4. The latter change will, fairly quickly, drive consumers back to professional reviewers/journalists (and prolific bloggers like Scoble, etc.) who at least have a long and easily-tracked record of level-headed product reviews to assess for bias.

"So what?" some might ask, we're merely witnessing the eventual wresting of control back into corporate hands of 'their messages'.  Sadly, yes, but what a wonderful world we had, for a time!  The opportunity for brand-owners to hear, AND BELIEVE!, the willingly and enthusiastically shared thoughts and feelings of honest consumers about their products and marketing efforts FOR FREE.

Don't get me wrong, of course the WWW is always going to allow people to speak freely (I hope...) and it will be possible to track 'brand buzz' better than ever with aggregation tools like Razorfish's "SIM" measure of brand health online, but in turning a free and open forum for consumer conversations back into an arena in which no one can be trusted to be providing an unbiased opinion, marketers are losing, I believe, more than they are gaining.  This is the 'hijacking' of genuine word of mouth on a grand scale.

Sure, these efforts will be met by new sites/services that "ensure our members are offering unbiased, unpaid for opinions" via counter-tracking search algorithms, but the damage is already being done to online credibility.  The challenge was to learn how to effectively leverage 'pull' efforts while gradually abandoning 'push'. You could argue that this is just a manifestation of incrementalism, but it really is all about re-exerting 'push' control on a virginal 'pull' medium.

Call me sentimental, but I think it's a sad thing and I pine for the good old days of 2008 when I could still do a quick Google or Twitter search and feel confident, once having discounted the suspiciously positive posts, that I was getting a fair and balanced overview of some product or service.

So Google is testing whether "push marketing" works?!? Weren't we past this point?

Comment on MediaPost article Google Tests Skippable Ads In YouTube Videos 

Google will begin testing "skippable" pre-roll ads in videos on YouTube Wednesday that could lead toward a new advertising model.  

The goal to move the industry toward more engaging high-quality ads requires a lesson in human behavior. The test that determines if and when people watch the video clips will provide Google with insight into the type of person who may skip an ad, what type of ad they might skip, and what piece of content does better than another.

?  I assume that there are some pretty clever people working on these Google video ad tests. Normally you'd start any testing with some basic premises -- insights into human nature that are universal and allow you to leap ahead, conceptually, and test something new -- not rehash false assumptions from the past (there's a definition of insanity from Albert that's begging to be repeated here...)

The one single thing that human behavior on the Internet, along with remote controls and DVRs, has told us all, loud and clear, is that consumers do not want any more "push" marketing, thus "The Death of Frequency" (link).  The end of endless repetition in advertising means that no one, not now and not ever before, wanted to see the same TV ad, no matter how funny or clever (although of course making every ad funny or clever/informative is job one), more than a couple of times.

Give people the chance to skip it and they will, just as they'll skip over the same episode of Dexter if they just saw it last week. This isn't a problem, exactly, since they will watch an ad that is relevant to them, or REALLY funny/clever, more than once. We just have to produce a lot more ad versions to surprise and engage them. Wouldn't acknowledging this simple fact be an excellent starting point for at least BEGINNING to put "push marketing" to death and reinventing the way we approach advertising strategy on the WWW? Apple and Lee Clow already get this.

 Just a thought.

A Real Step Towards an ROI Metric for Social & Experiential (& Display, Of Course)

Now I'm no media planning guru, my knowledge of the media segments' nuts and bolts is shallow, but if Universal McCann's Digital Director is excited about this, then it's something to wrap our heads around. He writes this in MediaBizBloggers.com today:

It would appear that (among other things) RealVu has developed a technology that allows them to identify when an online ad is "within the viewable area" of a user's screen, and for what duration. So, for ads that are run on a particular Web site that require a user to scroll "below the fold," their ad never gets requested until the user has scrolled to that part of the page.

Makes sense, right? Pretty innocuous you say? On average, across all placements that they have tracked – fully 50% of online ads are never viewed because they are outside of the user's viewable area. Say what?

Now, keep in mind this is a combination of all properties. Some long tail sites are poorly constructed and they may indeed have questionable motives, but this does include Top 100 properties as well. The number of ads that we are paying for that go unseen floored me.

So as I understand it, this technology, via your browser, tracks what you had visible in your window on any give site and records how much time it was visible. Should work on mobile phones as well. Sounds like a simple thing, right? Kind of like People Meters, but this is WAY more useful as it is more like eye-tracking (cameras recording what exactly you were looking at when watching a screen).

What this technology does is leapfrog over and ahead of any tracking we have today because it tells us precisely what web surfers were looking at and for how long. If combined with the old 'click-through' (which was always a suspect metric tool) this could well turn into a real, solid measurement of what is working, or not, with display and video ads on the Internet.

Simple, but HUGE!  Not because it measures tangible actions, per se, but intangible behavior.

The biggest problem the ad industry has with so-called "social marketing" is that it is 100% 'brand engagement' based.  What that means is that every dollar spent in "social media" is not expected to increase sales, but only to raise awareness about the brand.  Hopes (based upon a lot of evangelistic hype) that somehow this "brand engagement" was tied inextricably to brand loyalty/love have been dashed recently when Razorfish, a digital advertising leader, found in a study that consumer activity in social media is all about coupons and contests, not about developing some mysterious and deep lifelong attachment to the brand.

In other words, to date any 'investment' in 'social media' has been based upon gut-feel and following the flock, NOT on any measure of ROI.  As I've repeatedly said, there is no such thing as "word of mouth advertising", and 'social marketing' is nothing but an attempt to influence what people choose to talk about.  Anything carrying the label "social" is inherently NOT an advertising medium (unless you believe that telemarketing is an appropriate advertising medium).  I'm not saying that all the efforts being made in 'social media' today are ineffective -- splashing brand messages across any new medium gets noticed -- only that the spend is unjustified by any of the normal criteria we hear CMOs, CFOs and media mavens constantly harping about, for example...

Ironically, experiential marketing is not enjoying much of a gain in its slice of the media spending mix because marketers are demanding ROI metrics for it, yet "social," with no expectation of any real ROI (sales increases), is winning a significant budget.  However based upon 'gut feel,' testimonials and observation, we all KNOW that XM is actually the most effective marketing medium ever devised -- it has been around since the invention of human trade, swapping seashells for sabre-tooth tiger teeth.

What RealVu's tracking technology offers us, not today, but soon as we figure out how to cross-track and correlate data, is a methodology for accurately measuring not just display or video ads on websites, but the net effect and inter-relationship of both 'social' and experiential efforts on pushing consumers to websites and on to purchase and loyalty.  What I mean by this is that we'll be able to say we spent $X on an event branded for brand ABC's new flavor at which we had primary interaction with Y quantity of people and put coded coupons in all their hands, Z quantity of people spent N amount of seconds on the promo site in front of an online ad (or blog, or tweet, or....), P% clicked on the link and in that test market we saw a Q% increase in the new flavor. Demonstrable, cross-linked ROI.

No, this won't happen tomorrow, but with RealVu's advancements, the day is coming!

Razorfish Proves Consumers Value "Social Marketing" for Coupons & Contests, NOT Building "Lifelong Brand Engagement"

Thank the gods above!  Another nail in the coffin of the "social marketing" zealots hyping this 'new and mystifying' emerging media as a sure-fire way to build brand 'engagement' (and from Razorfish, no less). The amount of money being spent by normally conservative marketers in the gold rush to 'DO' 'social media' defies all reason.

From today's MediaPost:

Much has been made of the ability of social media to help brands connect with consumers in new and deeper ways -- to establish a "dialogue" with users through various interactive tools that blend seamlessly into their online activities. But a new study suggests the key to engagement on social properties comes down to old-fashioned direct marketing techniques like offering discounts and special promotions. 

"Based on our research, it's not so much about some type of 'shared passion' for a brand's values. Largely, it's about deals -- pure and simple," states the 2009 FEED report from Razorfish examining consumers' digital habits and attitudes.

Consumers are using marketing efforts in 'social media' to get discount coupons and participate in promos/contests. That's it. They are not suddenly becoming lifelong 'fans' of Windex or Heinz ketchup, despite what the zealots might be claiming.

'Social marketing' is not the new Scientology religion for building lasting brand loyalty, it's a coupon distribution and contest promo tool. Build a cute Facebook app that allows consumers to sign up for your brand's contest faster or delivers a 'newest flavor' 15%-off coupon to them and you've accomplished the mantra of 'provide consumers real value through Marketing 2.0's new sharing/social technology'.

What is really worth shifting marketing dollars to is where the underlying STRATEGY of 'engagement' is naturally going to lead marketers. But you've all read me ranting on about that already. "The More Marketing Changes, the More It Stays the Same"

Top Marketing Execs Think They're "Visionaries." NOT!

Interesting study done by the US Association of National Advertisers called "The State of Marketing: The Shift" (link) surveying 150 director up to CMO level execs.

• "69% indicated they felt they were a "Leader" or "Visionary" (the top two levels of professional development, according to the survey). 
• However, nearly half (46%) showed through behavioral indications that they were acting more like "Tacticians" or "Facilitators" (the two lower stages of development)." 

In actual fact, only 31% turned out to be true "visionaries":

• "...more likely to be leading strategic dialogue (89% vs. 11%), and more likely to be leading discussions about reinventing the overall business model (65% vs. 21%)."

Disregarding the ego issues (it is human nature, hard-wired in our brains, actually, to ignore evidence that we are not as terrific as we believe ourselves to be -- this helps us build up the confidence to go after promotions and become leaders), it what's most interesting here is the last bit: "leading strategic dialogue" and "reinventing the overall business model".

As an industry we pay a ton of lip-service to these things (TONS of articles speak to them these days, especially to innovating business models), but few leaders, let alone companies, can actually put them into practice.  It's not that they don't want to, the problem is that most people just aren't good at this rare combination of thinking skills, which require (in one person) both creative thinking AND strategic/conceptual analytical ability. However teams of people CAN inject both.

My point is that if today's agency-brand group teams are not working daily to both think deeply strategically (most so-called "social marketing" today is really just tactical execution) and reinvent, not their brand's tactics, but the actual underlying business model, then they are going to lose out to brand teams that are capable of doing both.  The real "Top Marketing Leaders" will encourage and support this kind of thinking, pushing for it to happen as the rule, not the exception.