Filed under: Interactive Marketing
As more of the media we watch, read and enjoy becomes digital, more of the marketing community is taking up the digital mantel. Welcome. It is true that if the work is kept fairly straight-forward and the agency team have a good production partner they can deliver the banners, microsites and e-mails that check the “digital” box.
But is that really digital marketing?
One of my favourite tests for a digital marketing campaign is to ask if it is “interactive” not just digital. Can the audience act and does the ad react? Hard to do in traditional media.
A second test is whether it is impossible to run the work without using the computer that serves it. Having a film or pieice of video call your mobile phone like our St. Mary’s Ghost campaign did is hard if you don’t have a processor behind it and the forethought to use it. This is different then putting a film on YouTube or print piece in e-mail.
But really the real point is that digital marketing is different from traditional marketing at a more fundamental level. Consider the article below. There is a fundamentally different way of thinking when you do real Digital Marketing — It isn’t about campaigns, it is about programmes. It isn’t about who (audience demographics), it is when (mindset and interest).
And it isn’t just about creative that needs a computer to run, it is about marketing plans that can’t even be organised, much less executed, without some very specific applications and very big networked computers behind them.
At Last, What Agencies Are Learning From Ad Networks Revealed
Posted November 6th, 2008 by Joe Mandese
“More and more we are starting to look like advertising networks,” Don Epperson, CEO of Havas Digital acknowledged during his keynote kicking off the OMMA Ad Nets conference in New York this morning. “I am here today to tell you what agencies can learn from advertising networks.”
And he did.
So what’s the main takeaway? Well, agencies are learning to target consumers based as individuals, not based on advertising placements. To illustrate that, Epperson showed a banner ad for Havas client Air France on the nytimes.com, and implied it may no longer be making such placements based on the context of the editorial content, but on the context of the user that happens to be on that page.
“That’s a very big change,” Epperson emphasized.
Before he went on, he added the obligatory disclaimer: That for all the power of Havas Digital’s super, hyper-targeted optimization capabilities, it’s still fundamentally a brand steward that relies on all the powerful consumer insights that traditional shops have always relied on.
“Regardless of what we talk about today, strategic planning, communications planning, brand planning are never going to go away,” he emphasized, adding, “They will always be very important. It will always be art and science.”
Just came across this article that was written back in 2000. We were a year into having set up in the UK and the dot com boom was still expanding, although Boo.com had collapsed. The amazing thing about this article to me is seeing how much of what we said then, we still say and do today.
Feature: Decoded: Organic - no call for booing
Decoded: Organic - no call for booing
Date: 25 July 2000
Along with Razorfish and Agency.com, Organic is one of the main US players operating on both sides of the Atlantic and, like many US interlopers, it’s quick to claim its relative years of experience as a competitive advantage. But Organic can legitimately claim to have been involved in one of the most salient experiences the sector has so far seen; one of its clients was Boo.com.
Not that the company bears any malice. John Baker, who moved across from the New York office to become UK managing director, says they parted on good terms and that Organic still stands by the work it did. “We still have people tell us that it was one of the most innovative sites,” he enthuses.
He does emphasise though, that Organic’s contribution was a small part, creating the Flash applications for the products and dressing room, as well as all the rich media advertising for Boo’s online campaigns. And, not surprisingly, there’s no longer any mention of the failed online sports fashion retailer in any of Organic’s press material; not so much standing by as saying bye.
Nevertheless, the experience is just one in Organic’s portfolio. Like it or not, the big US players are big precisely because they started earlier, and in a young industry, experience is all the more valuable.
3 card trick
Founded in San Francisco in 1993, Organic now boasts nine offices and 1200 employees worldwide. It opened its first international office in Sao Paolo, Brazil, at the end 1997, and is now operating in London, Singapore and Toronto, as well as across the US.
Having opened in London in June last year, the company has 90 employees based in its Queens Park office, including 25 engineers, 15 designers, 15 project management, 15 marketing solutions and 10 strategy consultants.
“We tend to operate with dedicated core teams, and build them out as we go,” explains Baker. “Unlike some agencies, we give the client around five key contacts -[for example] an engineering lead, creative lead and strategic lead, as well as the project leader.”
This, he says, helps keep communication open. “Experience shows us that if you only have a single point of client contact, like an account manager, it can become a bottleneck.”
As befits an agency located in Queens Park, just a stone’s throw from dotcom mecca in Notting Hill, its focus is on the more glamourous end of interactive services, specialising in design and marketing. Organics UK services are split into three departments: online marketing, i-business development and strategic consultancy.
Each of the sectors do operate standalone but, pressed for a particular strength, Baker says: “it has to be the integration,” meaning the offering of its three strands as a complete service.
Baker says i-business, the engineering part, forms the core of Organic UK’s work accounting for about 60% of its business. “We have strong skills in Flash, and with the ATG and BroadVision platforms. And we don’t think of WAP as a separate thing either,” he says. “It’s important to keep the engineers centralised, because they need to know how to make applications extensible to all devices.”
On the marketing side, which accounts for around 20% of business, Organic offers full online media services, from planning and executing basic banner campaigns to striking portal deals and running email campaigns.
Strategic consulting, which accounts for the last 20%, also includes offering its US-based customer services and fulfillment brokering. Baker explains: “We also offer consulting on everything after the customer hits the buy button - what kind of warehousing or packaging do they have? In the US we have relationships with warehouses and call centres, and can integrate our clients with these services if they require.”
Again, the Boo experience has bearing: “Boo had great (order) fulfillment in place and well-branded packaging. It’s just that their e-commerce engine was so horrendous.”
These services are currently only offered to UK clients on an ad hoc basis, but Baker says a full roll-out will take place here later this year. In the US, Organic is facilitating fulfillment for clients including Tommy Hilfiger and Iomega.
Clients and partners
Organic is one of IBM’s Global Services and Pervasive Computing partners, and does a lot of work with its WebSphere platform. It also has formal relationships with BroadVision, ATG (Art Technology Group), Open Market and Pandesic.
As Baker points out, such a range of partnerships is important because no one platform fits all clients. But while the company is not limited to these platforms, he also advises that the relationships are more than just marketing deals, providing training and technical support to Organic’s staff.
The company has a lot of its experience in industry verticals, such as electronic retail and telecoms. Clients include BT.com, for which Organic has recently completed its SME portal and Business Store on the BroadVision platform. It also built the front-end of IP telco Quip.co.uk’s site and eyestorm.co.uk.
As well as BT, Daimler Chrysler is Organic UK’s cornerstone client, working on its pan-European site. The company’s major US clients include Law.com, Blockbuster and Hewlett Packard.
Organic works on both fixed payment and retainer-based accounts, preferring the former for dotcoms and the latter for large corporates. Baker says this is because they tend to hand completed projects over to dotcoms, because, unlike traditional companies, the website is the dotcom’s core business.
Keeping to the front
Organic’s focus is very much on front-end solutions, with its skills in Flash and e-commerce systems. The company doesn’t do backend, preferring to work with other solutions providers for this, such as Unisys on the Quip account. “We don’t have a systems integrator approach,” explains Baker, “so we don’t do ERP or legacy integration.”
As is becoming increasingly common with larger agencies, last May it opened an R&D lab in its New York office, principally to experiment with wireless and broadband solutions. The lab operates in two ways. Firstly, the company funds research in areas it feels it needs to develop, to generate case studies and best practices, and secondly it co-funds with clients developments that directly benefit them. It’s currently running a WAP project for an undisclosed UK client.
Organic offers the usual company incentives to try and attract and keep staff, with “benefits, a recreation room, bagels, beer bashes and the like,” says Baker. It also stubbornly clings to one of the internet’s original business differentiators, proudly claiming its professional services take a “C2B” approach. As Baker puts it: “This reflects our user-centric development and the change in control from manufacturers to customers.”
Despite such platitudes, Organic is one of the few agencies that can point to some longevity. So what was the biggest lesson from the Boo experience? “I think it’s definitely a preference to have full service engagement on a project, to be accountable for what we do,” says Baker. “There were eight partners working on Boo, and we saw a lot of changes taking place that we couldn’t control, and all we could do was end on good terms.”
Filed under: Advertising, Interactive Marketing, Uncategorized | Tags: Digital Outdoor, Digital Signage, InteractiveMarketing
This is a video — or rather an ad in fact — that shows off some great use of smart digital outdoor and use of video in car and on mobile. It is really great piece of digital outdoor inspiration.
What is more amazing is that as the number of digital outdoor sites grows — we aren’t being more creative about how we use them. In most places (like the London tube) we’ve gone for video using the same 30 second ads formats that are being ignored or skipped on TV.
Or as this Thompson video shows, we’re using smart, internet-connected displays to cycle through static print!
Just a little bit of imagination and a motion sensor to make the signs at least a little bit interesting and — a key word that has been losing favour of late — interactive.
Taken to an extreme and by adding a touchscreen you have an kiosk or outdoor website or video wall as they are commonly called. Nice thing is — like using video assets in the Tube — you can repurpose web assets. And there are some great case studies of these being put in airports and trainstations where people have time and appreciate a brand giving them information or entertainment.
But in many of these examples we are still in brochureware.
Where is the live feed of relevant data? The personalisation of information that is relevant to the viewer who has been identified by RFID or their mobile phone? The tying together of a set of signs into an application that is both useful for the customer and reinforces the brands point of view?
Something to look forward to.
Filed under: AgencyLife, Interactive Marketing | Tags: Imaging, Internet, Links, Nimeh
This is an email George sent around the other day that is a classic collection of links cranked out as a “last thing before I run” e-mail.
Amazing set of links around only one subject — imaging. Not that I’d recommend missing the Porter on a Friday night at 9 pm but it is great to see serious obsession shared.
From: George Nimeh
Date: Fri, 25 Apr 2008 21:18:22 +0100
To: SEUK, Sony Ericsson Global, Planning
Cc: digitalgroup
Conversation: Thought for the day
Subject: RE: Thought for the day
> Ps anyone seen anything particularly interesting in the world of
> imaging recently? Please share, it seems to be Cyber-shot heaven round
> here at the moment
>
Below are a few “interesting” things that I’ve come across. Some of them may have already been sent around, but I think they’re all worth a review.
If any of you would like to chat about how iD could help SE understand/activate these ideas and themes to create buzz and traction around Cyber-shot (and thus help people buy), lemme know.
Have an excellent weekend,
~G~
Photosynth
I think this is spectacular.
http://labs.live.com/photosynth/view.html?collection=NASAColl/LaunchPad/index.sxs&st=coll <http://labs.live.com/photosynth/view.html?collection=NASAColl/LaunchPad/index.sxs&st=coll>
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p16frKJLVi0
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/129
http://labs.live.com/photosynth/video.html
Photosynth is a software technology preview from Microsoft Live Labs and the University of Washington that analyzes digital photographs to build a three-dimensional point cloud of a photographed object. Pattern recognition components compare portions of images to create points, which are then compared to convert the image into a model. Currently, users can view models built by Microsoft or the BBC, but not create their own models.
Radar
Mobile/online imagery that create “conversations”.
http://www.smstextnews.com/2008/01/instant_picture_conversations_with_radar_-_the_application_of_the_week.html
This week’s application is Radar, a phenomenally well put together service that enables picture conversations online and on-the-go. If photo sharing site Flickr is Web 2.0, then Radar is Mobile 3.0. Or something like that… The entire service has been conceived to run from your mobile, not as a bit-part of the overall experience. Yes there’s an online element for those sat at desks, but Radar is all about mobility. You can easily upload photos from your handset and all your subscribed friends can instantly see — and crucially, comment — on the photo. You can then easily see who’s been commenting and reply back and, before you know it, get into a dialogue with your friends about the picture. All by phone. That’s the way to do it.
Flickrvision
Hypnotic global entertainment, all based on geo-located photos.
http://flickrvision.com/
Flickrvision shows realtime, geolocated Flickr photos. Just like Twittervision, it’s hypnotic to watch. The map moves around to show the location of the most recent tweet or photo. Both visualizations hail from David Troy, a VOIP consultant who has suddenly found himself doing a lot of geo work. See: http://www.i-boy.com/weblog/2007/05/site-of-day-flickrvision.html
Picnik and Fotoflexer
Two free tools that make photography easier.
http://www.picnik.com/
http://fotoflexer.com/
If you use Photoshop for basic photo editing, you’ll love ‘em. They’re simple, free, web applications that do the job very well. I love the Flickr/Facebook/Picasa/Photobucket/Webshots integration. In addition to being fully integrated into Facebook, both apps lets you pull in your Flickr photos, edit them, and then save them back to Flickr. Sah-weet! See: http://www.i-boy.com/weblog/2007/11/picnik-and-fotoflexer.html
Animoto
Incredibly easy to use … and creates fantastic content.
http://animoto.com/
Animoto is a web application that automatically generates professionally produced videos, each a customized orchestration of user-selected images and music. Using patent-pending Cinematic Artificial Intelligence technology and high-end motion design, the result is a user’s own personal creation with the visual energy of a music video and the emotional impact of a movie trailer.
And finally … Interestingness!
http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/
Besides being a five syllable word suitable for tongue twisters, it is also an amazing new Flickr Feature. There are lots of elements that make something ‘interesting’ (or not) on Flickr. Where the clickthroughs are coming from; who comments on it and when; who marks it as a favorite; its tags and many more things which are constantly changing. Interestingness changes over time, as more and more fantastic content and stories are added to Flickr.
Filed under: Interactive Marketing, Measurement, Stats | Tags: Hitwise, social networks, webmail
For some time now people have asked if people will get overwealmed by their e-mail. Personal messages, work documents, shopping confirmation, newsletters, promotions — they all are coming to a single mailbox and leaving us all glued to our inboxes trying desperately to manage the deluge of information like computer scientists or Dewey Decimal librarians with folders, tags, labels and the like.
An alternative is to imagine a segmentation of e-mail into different applications — Facebook for personal, work on the company system (most like an installed e-mail client), purchases to a banking tool, news to RSS readers. They can all send notifications to a primary e-mail address, but by being specialised they offer more functionality to keep us all sane.
Consider the report just published by Hitwise about traffic figures from last year in the UK. Basically it calls out that social networks are getting more traffic in terms of % of total visits then webmail sites.
Of course there is more to do on Facebook then hotmail, but if hotmail is primarily used for talking to friends, it isn’t hard to envision it becoming the primary e-mail address and hotmail dropping off even more.
As people take to communicating more, it gets to be too much for an e-mail client — rapid fire chats are better managed in IM, general comments to the world in wall posts, group party invites through e-vites.
Computers are here to make our lives easier — specialisation of communication tools will be a great first step.
Some other great social networking stats from an FT article, Business Woo Social Network Figures, 15 Jan 2008:
- 14,000 people signed a Facebook petition to bring back the Wispa bar for Cadbury’s
- The Primark Appreciation Society has 100,000 members and receives gentle guidance from the retailer’s marketing team.
- Screwfix.com, a retailers site, has an electricians forum with over 300,000 messages on it.
And of course last years favourite also from Hitwise siting that Topshop and ASOS receive more referrals from MySpace then MSN Search and Yahoo Search combined. The figure was 5% of their traffic at the time in March 2007.
Filed under: Advertising, Interactive Marketing | Tags: Events, Interfaces, Video Walls
Throughout agencyland everyone is talking about what replaces the 30-second spot and standard print advertising to build awareness for brands, and for many marketers it is events and “experiential installations.”
While it is difficult to reach 2 million people with a festival, Innocent managed to get 120,000 people to attend its 2006 event in Regents Park, and if you consider only 10:1 people seeing press articles, interacting with online sites or simply hearing about it through friends you are quickly 1.2 million without counting any media used to promote the event.
Clearly the goal is to leverage the event and maximize the buzz or amount people talk about them. One great technique is to use technology and there are a host of great new tools being made available. Microsoft Surface has gotten a lot of attention but it is only the beginning. 
Consider what HP have done for the WSJ D5 conference or what the entrepreneurs at i-bar are proposing.
It doesn’t take much extrapolation to see every festival, airport and trainstation having a line of interactive walls for people to play with — and in the process learn about a new product or service.
How will they work? Gesture computing and intuitive interfaces … we hope. Take a look at Perceptive Pixels vision on YouTube below.
Filed under: Advertising, Interactive Marketing, Measurement | Tags: Quotes PR IMarketing DigitalOutdoor
Richard Wheaton from Neo@Ogilvy here in London talks about heading to a world where “all media is served.” It is a great idea and really highlights why we all must get our technical skills up to take advantage of it. My analogy is thinking of managing marketing like a search campaign instead of a classic TV plan.
Digital Outdoor is the first of the big traditional formats to change. Currently it is mostly video, but the signs aren’t dumb players and the scope for technical creativity is great. Here in London, Viacom’s plan is to put 2,000 digital sites as part of “a single digital advertising network.”
Add what has just been reported in Newsweek about using eye tracking technology for outdoor measurement. My comment was referencing outdoor ads that can be served by daypart or react to current sports events. Where Jenna Crombie took it is even better and really Minority Report — outdoor poster sites that measure if you look at them.
Aside from making Outdoor a more measurable medium, it also immediately opens up the possibility of billboards — or really some form of digital 4 sheets to use the jargon — reacting to when someone stops in a ticketing hall and decides to pay attention.
How much fun would that be? That would be amazing.
Filed under: Interactive Marketing, Ogilvy, Uncategorized | Tags: Agencies, IMarketing, OgilvyInteractive
This is a piece I wrote for the IAB Engage Conference Handbook:
The Future of Marketing?
“The advertising industry is passing through one of the most disorienting periods in its history … More people are rejecting traditional sales messages, presenting the ad industry with big challenges. ”
Economist, June 2004
“To find something comparable, you have to go back 500 years to the printing press, the birth of mass media …”
Rupert Murdoch, quoted in Wired, July 2006
It is an interesting time in the marketing industry.
Advertising agency executives, faced with the fast adoption of personal video recorders and shift of magazine content online, are convinced the business will cease to exist in as soon as five years. Or five minutes if you listen to Bob Garfield.
Direct Marketing agency executives are watching B2B communications shift aggressively to email and are questioning whether the traditional direct mail piece will be a relevant tool for generating leads or even delivering offers before too long.
PR agencies see that the tradition that all corporate communications is channelled through the corporate communications department to specific high circulation publishers is loosing relevance. Internal experts are expected to publish directly and the required response time for crisis management is minutes not days.
Finally, Media agencies are being presented viable online auction systems from SpotRunner, eBay and Google that could make the “buying clout” argument irrelevant. What’s more, they know the traditional media plan could quickly disappear as more channels are served and managed like search media.
In the face of all of this, amazingly the Digital Agencies also feel their business is under threat. As all briefs become “interactive briefs,” they are being stretched to compete with all agencies from all disciplines. They of all people recognise digital marketing encompasses a broad tool set and can be part of every campaign. As traditional agencies push for interactive work, they are looking to offer a broader solution including advertising or DM.
The piece that is critical is of course our clients. Marketing departments have their own pressures as product development, supply chains, communications and sales are impacted by technology. The last thing they need is their agencies bickering with each other over who does what, why and how.
As we go through this period of transformation, clients need to know they have a partner that can bring the people with the right skills to the table and know that there is clear programme management of their 360 campaigns. They need to know the core of their business will be delivered safely, but also know that their partner is willing to be adventurous. They know they need to be innovative, but briefing multiple agencies and managing the integration of the resulting work is more then a small challenge.
At OgilvyInteractive, our teams sit and work with each of the discipline organisation to be able to bring digital expertise together with the years of experience in advertising, direct marketing, healthcare marketing, sales activation or PR. As a community of digital professionals, we work with our colleagues in bespoke teams to meet our clients’ needs and work together to stay on top of the industry that is in constant change.
It may be a confusing time to be in marketing, but it is also a great time because the disciplines that were in silos in the past are now working together and clients are willing to test and measure new ideas. The big digital toolbox is being used to amplify great work across the disciplines which should be the result when you are doing real integrated 360 degree campaigns.
“All marketing will be digital sometime in the next 10 years”
–Steve Ballmer, CEO Microsoft, BusinessWeek, Oct 2007
Great quote for people in our industry and one that I think everyone fundementally believes.
It is interesting that in response to a threat to traditional software revenue, one of the smartest companies on the planet is focusing on advertising as its next source of revenue. Just when everyone thought advertising was dead.
What can we take away from this?
1) No one will pay for software anymore.
Microsoft believes people will not pay for applications. It is clear that Google also believes this and is putting into action from e-mail to word processing.
Stop and think of all of the applications you use to help you with your life –word processing, e-mail, financial planning tools, excersize trackers, vacation planners, home maintenance logs. Everyone of them can be provided by a brand in exchange for customers’ loyalty and not sold for £20 (or £200) at PC World.
2) Advertising isn’t dead, it simply has a new home
When a brand creates an application to help its customers, it still has to remind its customers why their product is relevant and let them know about new releases. This unobtrusive communication is the new advertising. Think of the VideoEgg and YouTube’s approach which recognises there are lots of times people want to watch an ad, not the current industry review in the UK to increase ad time from 7 minutes per hour to 12 on commercial TV.
3) Advertising will be driven by applications
Bob Garfield here talks about advertising being dead, or at least the 30 second spot. “Brands need to connect with customers.” We hear that a lot, but what does it mean? It means brands need to create applications that are useful and make a difference for their customers to pay attention and like them. That’s calculators, games, educational tools and billboards that notice your tire pressure is low and remind you take care of your car.
4) Learn to love your techies
Jonathan Nelson, founder of Organic, has always said “the world will never get less technical. It not like people can’t find more places to put microchips.” If marketers need to create applications to get their customers attention, they better learn the language of software development. People love to talk about digital channels, but a video ad can be a pre-roll on a website. That is digital but it isn’t unobtrusive. A print piece can be sent over e-mail. For marketing to be interactive, it needs to be functional. For anything — website, banner, billboard, video ad — to be functional, it has an application behind it.
Go out and hug a software engineer, it could be the most important thing you do for your marketing.
Shocking but true … always strange to see yourself presenting. Found this that my friends at marketing here at Ogilvy taped and posted.
