Oh MY God!
Posted: February 26, 2007 Filed under: Futurism, marketing, mobile 2 Comments »
So, what’s the report on Chinwag Live’s second event Mobile Metamorphisis? Well I’m a little torn. I think without Jonathan MacDonald (one of the speakers), it would have stood the chance of being a little dull. However, with him, it descended into a hideous .com self parody. Jonathan should have turned up for the first Chinwag event: Wobble 2.0.
Jonathan was representing Blyk, a company aiming to make a free, advertiser-funded, mobile phone network. Blyk was one of the main reasons for a bunch of us to go along tonight. It sounded like a brave idea – and one which might espouse a new fairer relationship between brands and consumers. And the company has some very impressive team, including the ex-president of Nokia as CEO.
Aside from being – frankly – gobby, Jonathan came out with a lot of stuff which I thought we’d left behind in 1999 meeting rooms. Perhaps, he told us, they only needed a small audience to get big advertising revenues because their advertising would be so much more effective and engaging than everyone else’s. DM he told us, shortly before the batteries fell out his calculator, needed audiences of millions becuase its typical response rate is 1.5%. The advertising on Blyk was going to get 60% response rates (I think he actually said 90% but I don’t want to misquote!) so only 10,000 customers would be needed. Although he did assure us that he could do that sum becuase it was “all 10s”.
He also told us his advertising would be different and more engaging on their platform. For example, not just “Honda is great” but “Which do you prefer, Honda or Fiat” (ahem, I think the wiseness of advertising your competitors has been fairly well documented. And when was the last time you saw car advertising saying “Honda is great”).
Chair, Tim Green – from Mobile Entertainment Magazine – then asked: “but aren’t your target market (16-24 year olds) all skint”. At this point we were treated to another visit to 90s. The first credit card people have in their wallet, we heard, is likely to be the one you use for life. He inserted a fictitious statistic at this point saying that this random statement was true in 80% of cases. Perhaps Jonathan should have a look at the stats from the most promiscuous market there is: the mobile phone market. But lets not lets the truth get in the way of a good story. I’m can only assume they’ll be whipping him with their two page business plan as they listen back to the podcast in the office tomorrow.
Very interesting points from lots of the rest of the presenters. In particular, Tim Green’s comments that most “entertainment” downloads are actually “self expression” – ring tones, wallpapers etc. And Russell Buckley from adMob who is saying he’s served 1bn mobile banners in the last 6 months.
Out of time
Posted: February 25, 2007 Filed under: music Comments Off
I was listening to Out of Time by Blur tonight and it made me realise an implication to the Long Tail that I don’t think has really been discussed.
Out of time from Think Tank bucked the trend of where Blur and Albarn were going. Unlike the band’s ealier records (like girls and boys), pretty much all of that album is uncommercial. It’s pretty difficult listening like the album 13 before it. As Blur matures they’ve become more challenging and, frankly better. The good, the bad and the queen are better still.
But Out of Time isn’t like that, Despite being more challenging and weird than alot of the charts, it’s really catchy and has simple pop motif. So it’s radio friendly and it did pretty well in the charts, reaching No 5 in 2003.
I don’t think the current Albarn records will chart, cool as they are. Partly because they’re a little too complex and partly because, nowadays (!) the charts going to be full of the Beatles! Long-tail reasons of course. But, and here’s where I started with all this, I suspect that Albarn (and the rest of artists affected by this phenomenon) are probably delighted that there music gets judged over the long-term – and very happy to see the back of Top of the Pops and the tyrany of the labels and radio stations.
Clearly consumers benefit from the extension of choice, but I’m interested too to see that it potentially benefits the artists themselves. I think the same could be true for the previously hit-obsessed worlds of film, modelling and (obscurely) politics.
Couple of other bizarre points I noticed working this piece out: Both records mentioned about are now selling on Amazon for under £6. When did the price of records really collapse? This was the band’s first video where none of them appear. Finally (and this is the most weird) this song has it’s own Wikipedia entry.
Necessary but not sufficient
Posted: February 21, 2007 Filed under: marketing, web2.0 5 Comments »
There is a great episode of Yes Prime Minister where Jim Tucker thinks he’s solved a difficult international diplomatic problem and Humphrey explains in his normal obsequious tone that Jim’s logic amounts to the same as “all cats have four legs, my dog has four legs. Therefore my dog is a cat”. (He phrases Jim’s original solution as “we must do something, this is something; therefore we must do it”)
Anyone who knows me will find this hard to believe but I studied logic at University. Of those three years this is one of two bits of logic I can remember: the difference between necessary and sufficient conditions (i.e. to be a cat means to have four legs but not the other way round).
Surely no one is stupid enough to make these mistakes in real life. Well do any of these ring a bell?:
- My Space is really popular, I want my brand to be really popular. Therefore my brand will re-invent MySpace.
- People love blogs. I want people to love my brand. Time for a brand blog.
- The forums on Money Saving Expert are really active and that creates passionate users. I want passionate users, so I should add forums to my site.
Our challenge for today is to nominate a brand-related site which has entered into the spirit of enabling users without wearing the clothes of a digital brand.
Daft
Posted: February 15, 2007 Filed under: marketing, web2.0 Comments Off
Well how annoying, Nicola’s blog has only been up five seconds and she’s already getting more traffic than me! Must be the styling. And it’s funnier! I particularly liked the piece on America’s dumbest quiz show contestant (image above).
Well speaking of daftness, New Media Age reports today that agency DNA is looking to move further into the web 2.0 by appointing former head of interface as a creative director (pay walled).
Clearly what the original press release is trying to say is two fold:
- that usability is as important as creativity
- that DNA is a really “web 2.0″ agency
OK, so (1) usability is as important as creativity: Are they really bragging that they’ve just recognised this today – ten years in? Are they saying to their clients ‘Up to now we just used to give your customers a load of nice-looking stuff that didn’t work and they couldn’t use but was very creative. That’s about to change’. And the fact that ‘creative director’ is given almost as an honorary title but one which doesn’t require any skills is not exactly flattering to anyone, but does indicate who wears the pants in that family. Why don’t they promote a creative person to head of usability!!
(2) The implication is that Web2.0 is about how you do presentation layer, that by making changes to and adding features to a front-end you can improve usability and engagement. This is where we really lose touch (“I’m going to have to go with my instincts… is it Elephant?”).
Let’s not forget that the best interfaces are invisible and utility is not a product of implementation. Ajax and other “2.0″ front end styling conventions and interfaces are obviously not solutions in themselves, they are techniques used in solving user problems. You can have a competely unusable site jammed full of 2.0 techniques and a fully usable site without one in sight (erm… Google anyone).
I agree that there is a polarisation amongst agencies: technically good ones and creative ones. But this sort of tokenism and knee-jerk reaction serves to highlight the problems not solve them.
Wobble 2.0
Posted: February 11, 2007 Filed under: Futurism, marketing, web2.0 1 Comment »
It was a pleasure to attend Chinwag‘s inaugral live event “Wobble 2.0” at the Slug and Lettuce on Wardour Street on Tuesday (6th Feb).
The little speeches by the panel were alright, although not broadly on the topic but more a potted elevator pitch from each one’s dot.com.
Mike Butcher was suprisingly nervous but great during the actual question and answer bit. He started out reading opening remarks – a little potted article that included some funny reminiscences from the last time round and the craziness of the late 90s.
Dave Nicholson from Zopa gives good elevator pitch but his enterprise isn’t really a bubble candidate since it’s in banking and a genuinely good idea.
Ryan Carson (silly hat) co-director (and presumably global executive president) of Carson System, had a very funny argument that .coms need to be financially viable before explaining that his wasn’t, and funnily enough then complaining that the was having trouble selling it at a 12:1 P/E ratio.
At least they all agreed that .coms needed immediate strategies to be profitable.
The best by miles however was Andrew Orlowski from the register who was fantastically acerbic making the following three observations that I wrote down:
- A lot of web 2.0 is people trying to solve general or technology problems with front end solutions (he actually said presentation layer solutions)
- A lot of .coms try solve problems that don’t exist (e..g. DocMartens reinventing MySpace, all those websites to store your friends birthdays and stuff). This certainly has an impact on brand-utility questions.
- His finest point. People assume that the connectivity improvements that are possible using the internet expand the field of human expression, contact and discourse. He questions this. His example is that he can go to a party and end up in a discussion with someone who disagrees with him on a range of points but they end up getting on and continuing his discussion. This, he points out, will never happen online. So we do need to make sure we don’t reduce the debate through the consensus-filtering that blogs so often apply.
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