Archive for March, 2010
Has Apple’s hype gone too far?
Mar 31st
Hype has not just got the better of Apple consumers, but the company itself. Ahead of its launch in the US, the iPad already appears to be sold out.
Unlike any of its launches before, Apple decided to allow pre-orders via the internet of it’s latest product. This could be why Apple has pushed back the launch date from this weekend to the 12 of April.
There’s certainly hype around the iPad, but with rumours that it’s sold out already and the availability of it online, the stores (221 retail giants around the US including Best Buy stores)it is unlikely that Apple fans will be lining up outside the stores overnight as they did with the launch of the iPhones.
After announcing the iPad in January, Apple coped a lot of criticism. The problem: the rumour mills anticipating the iPad had been working in over drive for some months speculating what the tablet computer might be able to do. The launch result: disappointment.
Many criticized the fact that the iPad wouldn’t support Flash and focused on the fact it did not include a camera.
Will advertisers benefit from The Times’ pay-walls?
Mar 30th
News that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp will be erecting pay-walls around two of its flagship UK papers – The Times and The Sunday Times – should be well received by advertisers. After all, they’ll finally have some definite demographics to work with.
The pay-walls will also coincide with the launch of the Apple iPad, which goes on sale next month. It is predicted to revolunitonise media and marketing by allowing advertisers to serve up interactive and engaging campaigns meaning that now, more than ever, it is most important to be delivering the right ads to the right audiences.
With subscription based content comes details. Those details mean more targeted, more effective advertising. And with that comes better, more traceable ROI.
And advertisers are looking to spend money this year.
According to Aegis-owned media agency Carat, global ad spend will increase by 2.9% this year and by 4% in 2011.
The agency’s global ad spend forecast for 2010/2011 reveals that the advertising market, which has suffered the worst decline since the 80s over the past year, is recovering, albeit modestly.
But there are a number of global events taking place this year that should help boost ad spend including the FIFA World Cup in South Africa, the World Expo in Shanghai and the Commonwealth Games in Delhi.
After losing a combined £88 million last year, The Times and The Sunday Times are desperate for a recovery in revenues.
If the News Corp papers can get advertisers on board by selling their position as having absolute data on their readership, then the mastheads have a good chance of recovery.
A good example of well-targeted advertising is the Financial Times. The paper has a very specific readership and thus allows advertisers to reach their intended audience. Its advertisers include those expensive watch brands, investment banks and first class airline seating. The likes of The Times, however, includes advertising ranging from supermarket brands, holidays, cars, TV programs and economy class.
When the pay-walls go up, The Times will be able to tell exactly who is reading, where they live, their age, their professions, their marital status, and the list goes on. There’s no limit to the amount of information the papers, and subsequently the advertisers, will have access to.
The Times is just the first of many that will implement pay-walls. It’s now up to advertisers to figure out how they can benefit.
Digital TV everywhere. Google, Apple and Yahoo will slug it out
Mar 29th
There’s been a lot of talk lately about Google TV, Apple TV and Yahoo! TV. While there are many out there touting its arrival, consumers are already watching TV through their computers, the future is upon us.
Some years ago, I remember seeing a story on 60 Minutes about the future of TV. Living in Australia at the time, in an outback wayward town where we only had four TV channels, seeing this story and Liz Hayes explaining that we’d soon have over 200 channels available to us, through HD (whatever that meant) seemed somewhat futuristic.
Yet, all those ‘beyond 2000’ predictions seemed to have integrated themselves perfectly, and somewhat under the radar.
Back then, I though 200-odd channels were exciting. I wanted to watch CNN and all those American reality shows…like the one with the people stranded on an island. Now days, the reality is much better.
Being the proud owner of a new 27-inch iMac – the screen which adorns my lounge room TV unit – I now watch TV digital through my computer screen.
Alway being connected is no longer a luxury, it’s a normalcy. No wonder the internet giants are looking to cash in.
Google has tied up with Intel, Sony and Logitech for a project which is currently called Google TV. Under this, all the involved companies want to create a technology to make navigation of web applications easy through TV.
It’ll be competing with Yahoo!, which has already launched a ‘Widget Engine’ for TV sets at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) earlier this year that will allow consumers around the globe to connect to the internet via their TVs.
The search company will begin shipping the widgets by the end of Q1 2010.
The race is on.
Video advertising drives brand engagement and really works!
Mar 26th
Video and display advertising drives sustained brand engagement regardless of users clicking on ads or not, according to new research from comScore and .Fox International.
The combined study found that video and display advertising are effective at driving significant uplift in site visitation and advertiser search queries, even in the face of minimal clicks on ads.
Consumers are 28% more likely to visit a brand’s website and nearly twice as likely to conduct a trademark search if they see a video ad for that brand, according to the research.
The .Fox International study underscores the fact that consumer search behaviour is positively impacted by the presence of display or video advertising – even in the face of minimal clicks.
The results are particularly significant given sharp decreases in online advertising click-through-rates over recent years, with the UK being the worst affected of leading global markets.
Video is able to generate a more immediate impact in the first five exposures than display ads in terms of increases in site visitation and search queries.
However, behavioural response for those exposed to display climbed steadily as the number of ad impressions increased.
Twitter users – addicted and more engaged than ever
Mar 26th
Despite reports that Twitter growth has slowed considerably and that many users are either inactive or have given it up, there still appears a good proportion of web users out there that are addicted to the micro-blogging site.
According to data from HubSpot, Twitter’s growth is slowing dramatically – its growth rate falling to 3.5%.
However, Twitterers are more engaged than ever. Global news navigator www.OneNewsPage.com polled its users this week with the question: “Did you try and leave Twitter but found you couldn’t give it up?”
Out of 300 replies, 42% agreed they had tried to quit Twitter but couldn’t give it up.
Dr Marc Pinter-Krainer, CEO of One News Page, said, “Twitter clearly has some addictive qualities for those who get beyond firing off a few tweets and abandoning it shortly afterwards. They join the likes of comedian Stephen Fry and singer Lily Allen who came back after publicly announcing on Twitter that they were off.”
According to a recent report from The Retrevo Gadgetology title ‘Is social media an addiction?’, about half of Facebook and Twitter users say they check the social networks after they go to bed at night or first thing in the morning.
A Perfect World
Mar 25th
I’ve been thinking about writing a fulsome post on perfect competition for a while now.
It’s as a result of a previous post here and there, new technological developments I keep seeing around and about, and as a throwback to my economics & econometrics degree (and doesn’t THAT seem a long time ago now).
The thought behind the whole thing is this;
The advances we are making are pushing us further towards ‘perfect competition’, which is increasingly making it hard for companies (especially retail ones) to generate the profits they used to.
Now, of course perfect competition is an economic theory… which it makes it highly unlikely (if not impossible) for it to occur in real life.
But essentially it’s this; if you have lots and lots of firms, each producing homogeneous goods, then no-one can make a profit.
No-one can set a price above that which other people are charging, as then people will buy the same good from a cheaper rival.
I started looking at the wikipedia entry to remind me of some of the characteristics that a perfectly competitive market can have…
- Infinite Buyers/Infinite Sellers – Infinite consumers with
the willingness and ability to buy the product at a certain price,
Infinite producers with the willingness and ability to supply the
product at a certain price. - Zero Entry/Exit Barriers – It is relatively easy to enter or exit as a business in a perfectly competitive market.
- Perfect Information – Prices and quality of products are assumed to be known to all consumers and producers.
- Transactions are Costless – Buyers and sellers incur no costs in making an exchange.
- Homogeneous Products – The characteristics of any given market good or service do not vary across suppliers.
…and realised that a lot of them are becoming a step closer. For instance…
Infinite buyers / Infinite sellers
Of course, ‘infinite’ is impossible. But if you’re selling goods nowadays (computer peripherals, for example), then the number of buyers you can possibly reach has grown exponentially; whereas once you may have a shop on the main street in town, now you just need a spare bedroom and eBay and you can reach anyone in the world who’s looking to buy a cable for this or that.
Living a 3D life
Mar 25th
A few of us from PHD & PHD Drum went over to see a company called Inition yesterday; we worked with them on making the Cadbury’s fairtrade ad from Fallon into a 3D version for showing before Avatar.
And we saw lots of really cool 3D TV stuff, and some augmented reality malarkey too…
…but the thing that I was most excited about was their 3D printer, especially after various posts here and there and of course the end section of my social production presentation.
They’re not just making solid objects… they can print mechanical models with moving parts…
…and even really complicated stuff like chainmail, all in one go. It moves just like you’d imagine chainmail to move, too…
How social media is changing email marketing
Mar 25th
2010 is set to be the year social media makes email marketing more powerful, according to new research from eMarketer.
It says that in 2009 e-mail marketers started to get social, but in 2010, the medium will start to see social media as a friend, partner and ally.
Social media is not a threat to e-mail marketing because it provides new avenues for sharing and engaging customers and prospects, according to the online marketing researcher.
Debra Aho Williamson, eMarketer senior analyst and author of the new report ‘Maximizing the E-Mail/Social Media Connection’, says that even though people are spending more time using social media, they are not abandoning e-mail.
“The two channels can help each other,” she says. “[They] offer the opportunity for marketers to create deeper connections.”
More than four in 10 business executives surveyed by StrongMail said integrating e-mail and social was one of their most important initiatives for 2010, behind improving e-mail performance including targeting and growing opt-in lists.
The survey also reveals that 18% of business executives want to add social components to their e-mail campaigns, however, they don’t know where to begin.
uSocial media and politics: power to the people?
Mar 24th
Andrew Boyers, from onlinefire explains how the general election will dominate social media.
The General Election is unlikely to be dominated by social media, as it was in the 2008 American presidential election. It will, however, be the first in this country to be influenced by its presence.
One only has point to Barack Obama’s success to see the benefits of using social media as a grassroots support tool. While millions of dollars were raised and on-the-ground activists united behind Obama, I did not detect much political discourse permeating through the official channels of his social media platforms.
Arguably, the opposite is the case in the UK – little political online activity in this country is aimed at recruitment and fundraising. There are, however, a number of politicians and commentators who seek to communicate with voters and influence the political agenda through social media – @kerrymp, @torybear, and @campbellclaret, to name just three.
Indeed, both the major party leaders, David Cameron and Gordon Brown, have sought to harness social media with their own viral video efforts – Webcameron and the Number 10 YouTube channel – with debatable degrees of success.
It’s fair to say that politics and social media in the UK is still the preserve of a comparatively small group of people either inside the Westminster bubble itself, or those with a strong interest in what’s going on in the corridors of power.
However, discourse within that small group is having an impact on a wider scale – and much of that conversation is generated through social media. For example, many people will have seen the numerous parodies of the David Cameron ‘We can’t go on like this’ Tory posters generated by @mydavidcameron and documented in the wider press. Even at this early stage of electioneering, political capital has been gained and lost by the major parties’ presence on social media and other users’ reactions to the parties.
This is only likely to intensify as the number of people interacting with politics via the Internet increases. Moving forward, social media avenues such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube will be vital to engaging with the electorate as a whole and in particular youth voters, a highly apathetic generation, according to a Guardian article.
So while we probably won’t see Gordon and David ditching their despatch boxes any time soon, it’s certainly worth noting that their stance and success are going to be increasingly influenced by online activity, starting with this year’s election.
Race is on for publishers large and small to get mobile
Mar 23rd
Think publishing. Think revenue generation. Think multi-platform. Or your future might look pretty bleak.
Going mobile is nothing new to publishers. After all, how many years has WAP been around, never mind the smart phone.
But the planned launch of the iPad and it’s potential to revolutionise media and publishing is encouraging on those publishers to take action.
The reasons are simple. Going digital – and mobile – opens up the door on alternative revenue steams.
It’s something we’ve touched on a few times, most recently with the launch of Skimkits, but as tech advances, so do the opportunties.
However while major publishers may have had the budget and resources to make the digital leap, it’s not been so easy for smaller players such as bloggers.
A new development may be set to change all that. A new tool has been released that allows publishers to create and monetise a mobile version of their website, turning RSS feeds and web pages into mobile pages.
The best news is that Mobilizer, as developed by BuzzCity, is a free service, with no hosting fees, and free publisher support.
It allows publishers to start earning mobile display advertising revenue with a payout of up to 65 per cent of total ad revenues. Publishers are able to choose the type of adverts that will appear on their mobile website as well as the number of ads and their position.
“It is common knowledge that consumer behaviour is shifting. Reading habits evolved from print-based media to web-based media and now mobile media is really coming in to play,” explains KF Lai, CEO of BuzzCity.
“It is vital that publishers are making their content readily available on the mobile. Many have invested in apps for the iPhone but this will only serve a small section of the market.”
In addition, publishers receive a unique QR code to display on their website, newspaper or magazine.
Users with a camera phone equipped with the correct reader software can scan the image of the QR Code causing the phone’s browser to launch and redirect to the programmed URL.
The simple act of reading may never be the same again…
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