A year ago I published a post internally at JWT, and here on Altacircle, talking about why agencies need to learn software development.  The argument was that all good digital marketing is software at the end of the day, and that as long as most agency personnel respond with the expression “but I’m not technical,” it will be hard for us to do good digital marketing.   Today Joe Lozito, SVP Technology at Digitas, published a piece on Digiday titled "Why Marketers Need to Think Like Developers" on the same theme.

A big part of my argument from a year ago was that as our advertising / marketing industry changes, this is a big an opportunity.  IT spending is over 3 times advertising spending and as advertising become more technical, it is likely marketing will call on IT to divert funds from internal infrastructure projects to technical projects that are consumer facing.

Just this past December, Gartner has published its predictions for 2012 and has stated that by 2015 they expect 35% of IT expenditure to be managed outside of the IT department.  This can be seen as a threat if those budgets are handed to traditional IT partners like Accenture or the new breed like Sapient, but it is also an opportunity if the overall IT expenditure remains the same and the funds are shifted to teams that understand consumer needs and how to make a compelling user experience.

Of course these moves don’t happen overnight.  Technical projects include technical people and they have every right to question the capability of their partner doing the work.  So once again, agencies really do need to learn software development.

Marketing Code: Why Agencies Need to Learn Software Development

The world’s fixation with technology isn’t new.

CES is has grown so big people need Segways to get to their keynotes, Intel has posted the highest revenue in it’s 42 year history and  according to Gartner worldwide IT spending will be $2.5 trillion in  2011.  This is a number which is more than 3 times worldwide advertising spending.

What is new is that after years of curiously watching their IT  colleagues wrestle with ERP supply chain systems, marketers are being  dragged in.

Amends on a set of rich media ads aren’t covered in e-mail, they are  managed through an extranet bug tracker.  The campaign planning to  redesign a brand site starts with a workshop to agree use cases.  Under  half way into a six-month project to launch a set of in-store displays  we learn a three day delay on approving the concept will shift the  launch date three days.

This is the world of systems integration and you only need to  consider a few of the activities that make up marketing today to see why we marketers really need to learn software development.

http://altacircle.com/blog/2010/12/31/marketing-code…re-development/

Coming back to the US one of the biggest advertising things you notice is healthcare advertising — whether it is on TV, in print or online.

At JWT we have a big Healthcare practice and have just launched a first release set of websites for a new pharmaceutical for our Johnson & Johnson client.   It has been amazing seeing the work it takes to get basic product information online in this sector — managing regulatory and legal definitely add a level of complexity to the usual job!

At anyrate congratulations to the team — great to see the initial communications coming out after having worked on the pitch and strategy. 

For those member of my family that are still wrestling with what exactly digital advertising is, this is a good dose of our current thinking.  The panel session focused on measurement and the audience was mostly publishers so I talked to that, but also managed to bring in some of the Brand Journalism case studies and Nightlife Exchange.

Thank you Vizu and Scribemedia for the invite to the panel.

http://www.scribemedia.org/2011/07/12/creative-agency-as-business-consultant/

If you feel like giving up a whole 30 minutes and hear the agency perspective on the shift of advertising dollars from traditional to digital channels, here is yet another BIG chance!

Panel was moderated by Dan Beltramo, CEO & Founder of Vizu and consisted of
Paul Gunning, CEO Tribal DDB,
Carl Fremont, EVP / Global Media Director at Digitas, and
myself (sitting in for Bob Jeffrey).

Interesting highlights from my perspective?

• It is harder to move marketers from TV spending then print or radio part because it works and part because it is fun for marketers
• Local can replace print for retailers that need to cover specific metropolitan areas
• Media is all being measured and recession has forced ROI conversations about each media channel
• New IAB units are driving excitement clientside and in the industry.  Real campaigns versus simple banner ads
• Innovative multichannel ideas throw the whole media plan up in the air

Here is the archived stream: http://www.livestream.com/digiday/video?clipId=pla_1980fdee-ea17-4b7a-87e9-636bb512d30e

Lots of people call out great videos on YouTube.  The Keyboard Cat and Double Rainbow probably have as much unaided awareness as Coke Zero and this shouldn’t be surprising, video works.  TV advertising and millions of dollars of research has proven that over 50 years.

My question is as video moves online, how will it become more interactive?  YouTube has their Creative Gallery which talks about adding a set of different techniques:

• Overlay Information
• Outbound Links
• Branching Storylines
• Interactive Scenes

and there are a number of other companies offering tools like Video Tagging.  But none of these seem to be catching on a real advertising unit or interactive tool.
We can’t say it all hasn’t been hyped.  In 2006 Business Week ran an article “Video Tagging Gets Cool.”  In 2007 MGM Grand’s “Maximum Vegas Tour” had clickable areas for overlay information and navigation and won a Bronze Cannes Lion.  Today, Maximum Vegas is still on MGM Grand’s site, but it is a linear video.  Video tagging isn’t talked about and few videos include hotspots, branching storylines or even adjacent content tied to the video timeline. 
When you look at a case like Samsung’s “Follow Your Instinct” you see a branching video story that has high production values and sexy actors, but only 300k views.  Perhaps the product message is too strong to go viral like Double Rainbow (28 million views) or keyboard cat (15 million) or even Old Spice’s man on a horse (where the making of had 1.7m views).
It is well understood that video assets made for TV end up on YouTube and that they will be linear.  But all of us are also filming for digital channels and catching outtakes and looking to push the envelope to make our work more engaging. 
Why not more interactivity?

For the last few years we’ve been working with Coty across various brands, but most recently with Rimmel helping build awareness for their products in the US.  “Get the London Look” is the international tag line, so we went out and found 10 active video bloggers and asked them to interpret the London Look for their US audiences.

Rimmel London wanted to raise its awareness in the US using online. It worked with marketing agency Iris, which partnered with youth network Ruby Pseudo to find ten American brand ambassadors.

“Developing a social media presence has provided us with a forum to have a direct dialogue with our customers,” says Rick Goldberg, VP of US marketing at Rimmel London. “To truly connect, though, we need to earn the attention of our audience with the content we put out there. It’s not enough simply to have a presence. We know they don’t always want to hear from us alone, so we engaged ten creative, fascinating women to provide their
thoughts on trends, London, cosmetics and creativity.”

The girls have been set ten challenges over ten months, finishing on Rimmel London’s tenth anniversary in the US. “We can link the content they post in their social worlds through Rimmel London’s social media profiles, plus content from rimmellondon.com,” says Goldberg.

he campaign more than doubled the number of mentions of Rimmel London online within three months, increased the number of monthly visits to rimmellondon.com from 32,674 to 50,639, and increased the site’s number of monthly unique visitors from 27,943 to 45,108.

In 2008 we did a classic 3 month push to launch Connect by Hertz, a new car club from Hertz.  Like most entrepreneurial ventures it was fast and chaoitc but fun.  We did the branding, site design, user experience and front-end application build.

In August we launched a major revision to the application.

In this release there is advanced filtering of car locations, the ability to book cars across different geographic services and fully editable account information.

Aside from the UX design, iris also has done all of the MS .Net application that talks to the Hertz car club provider, Eileo, via an API.  Great stuff.

This is a great example of how branded content, well executed, can grow bigger than a marketing campaign and generate real revenue back to the brand and agency.  Great work iris!

Channel 4 to air Sony Ericsson mobile programme

By Sara Kimberley, campaignlive.co.uk, 29 July 2010, 11:51AM

Sony Ericsson’s mobile music and entertainment programme, ‘Pocket TV’, is to air for the first time on Channel 4.

Pocket TV: Sony Ericsson mobile programme to air on Channel 4

Channel 4 has acquired the rights to the show, which has been a hit online and on mobile platforms, attracting 8.4 million views across YouTube, PS3/VidZone and MSN during series two.

The show, developed by Iris as branded content for Sony Ericsson, was originally created for the mobile platform and hosted a number of four- to six-minute interviews and live music tracks from artists including Ellie Goulding, Chipmunk and Sean Kingston.

A TV version will now be aired on Channel 4’s T4 and 4Music slots from 4 August.

The programme will include 11-minute shows featuring three videos each. The programme’s dedicated YouTube channel will run until the end of December.

Shaun McIlrath, executive creative director of Iris, said: “This is a great example of a marketing asset generating a value of its own because of the audience it has created. ‘Pocket TV’ has become quite a phenomenon”.

This article was first published on campaignlive.co.uk

There have been a few articles lately about Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty and it appears the campaign is losing steam and that is showing in the sales and share numbers.  I find it surprising a campaign that is so based in an idea that is so much bigger than the product isn’t still resounding with consumers.
What are the longest running ad campaigns today?  Smokey Bear’s Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires (since 1944)? Absolut’s bottles (since 1980)?  Neither of these are fundamental to the product.
I’ve always thought this campaign would last longer and enjoyed working on it.  Makes me wonder what types of campaigns do last longest.

In Its Campaign for Real Beauty, Dove Tells Women That They Are Beautiful as They Are. But the Push Is Showing Signs of Aging

By Jack Neff

Published: September 24, 2007

BATAVIA, Ohio (AdAge.com) — As Dove’s widely lauded Campaign for Real Beauty enters its fourth year, the results aren’t looking so pretty anymore. After two years of double-digit sales growth and share gains, Dove’s sales have abruptly slowed. That raises the question of whether the campaign, hailed as one of the most courageous creative breakthroughs in recent years, went a step too far in embracing aging in all its naked, wrinkled and sagging glory. …

http://adage.com/article?article_id=120640

There are times when you really have to be impressed with the power of social media.

Take a simple idea — like a competition based on voting to allow a chocolate bar company choose a set of pictures for its next years packaging — and what do you get? A absolute frenzy.

It was all very simple — 1 vote per child per day.  And the top voted child ended up with over 20,000 votes.

Celebrity and Competition:  An amazing recipe for getting engagement.

Nonetheless we did hope for a bit of activity and we got it.  Over 4700 entries.  Nearly 8 million pageviews with visitors from hundreds of countries.  Facebook groups.  Recruiting votes from local football club forums.  Blogs about an entry with downs syndrome that galvanized support groups.

We also got mothers complaining it was rigged and other parents were cheating.  People saying on forums the kids in the lead were “FUgly.”  An audit by the ASA.

Not that it wasn’t expected.
–We put in Captcha codes on voting and tiered the competition to ensure only panel selected children went to a second round.
–We ensured that selection was based on funny quotes, not just photos or votes.
–We built registration for the final round.
–We called forum owners and had inappropriate posts taken down.
–We cleared the ASA review and helped educate them on social media.

And were nominated for a Revolution Award.