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Seem funny?  Actually this is the post from migrating my blog to a self-hosted environment.  Watch out developers, getting serious.  Seems only fair that I should understand a bit about plugins, CSS and social networking tools since I talk about it endlessly.

Only 3 hours in at this point, probably another 3 and I’ll be just where I was with Wordpress.com!

As my brother used to say when starting my truck and hearing a solid crunch, “nice starter motor, change it yourself?”

If anyone tells you digital marketing isn’t technical, tell them they are crazy.  It is true that you don’t need to understand compression ratios to drive a car, but you better have hand-eye coordination!

Just came across this again haphazardly–or not so haphazardly if you consider that I was reading a feed of Clay’s writings–and thought I would post it again.  It is really a great piece of thinking:

I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.

The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing– there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London. And it wasn’t until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders–a lot of things we like–didn’t happen until having all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset.

It wasn’t until people started thinking of this as a vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an industrial society.

If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would’ve come off the whole enterprise, I’d say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened–rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before–free time.

And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.

We did that for decades. We watched I Love Lucy. We watched Gilligan’s Island. We watch Malcolm in the Middle. We watch Desperate Housewives. Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat.

And it’s only now, as we’re waking up from that collective bender, that we’re starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We’re seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody’s basement.

This hit me in a conversation I had about two months ago. As Jen said in the introduction, I’ve finished a book called Here Comes Everybody, which has recently come out, and this recognition came out of a conversation I had about the book. I was being interviewed by a TV producer to see whether I should be on their show, and she asked me, “What are you seeing out there that’s interesting?”

I started telling her about the Wikipedia article on Pluto. You may remember that Pluto got kicked out of the planet club a couple of years ago, so all of a sudden there was all of this activity on Wikipedia. The talk pages light up, people are editing the article like mad, and the whole community is in an ruckus–”How should we characterize this change in Pluto’s status?” And a little bit at a time they move the article–fighting offstage all the while–from, “Pluto is the ninth planet,” to “Pluto is an odd-shaped rock with an odd-shaped orbit at the edge of the solar system.”

So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, “Okay, we’re going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever.” That wasn’t her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, “Where do people find the time?” That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, “No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you’ve been masking for 50 years.”

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, “Where do they find the time?” when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that’s finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.

Now, the interesting thing about a surplus like that is that society doesn’t know what to do with it at first–hence the gin, hence the sitcoms. Because if people knew what to do with a surplus with reference to the existing social institutions, then it wouldn’t be a surplus, would it? It’s precisely when no one has any idea how to deploy something that people have to start experimenting with it, in order for the surplus to get integrated, and the course of that integration can transform society.

The early phase for taking advantage of this cognitive surplus, the phase I think we’re still in, is all special cases. The physics of participation is much more like the physics of weather than it is like the physics of gravity. We know all the forces that combine to make these kinds of things work: there’s an interesting community over here, there’s an interesting sharing model over there, those people are collaborating on open source software. But despite knowing the inputs, we can’t predict the outputs yet because there’s so much complexity.

The way you explore complex ecosystems is you just try lots and lots and lots of things, and you hope that everybody who fails fails informatively so that you can at least find a skull on a pikestaff near where you’re going. That’s the phase we’re in now.

Just to pick one example, one I’m in love with, but it’s tiny. A couple of weeks one of my students at ITP forwarded me a a project started by a professor in Brazil, in Fortaleza, named Vasco Furtado. It’s a Wiki Map for crime in Brazil. If there’s an assault, if there’s a burglary, if there’s a mugging, a robbery, a rape, a murder, you can go and put a push-pin on a Google Map, and you can characterize the assault, and you start to see a map of where these crimes are occurring.

Now, this already exists as tacit information. Anybody who knows a town has some sense of, “Don’t go there. That street corner is dangerous. Don’t go in this neighborhood. Be careful there after dark.” But it’s something society knows without society really knowing it, which is to say there’s no public source where you can take advantage of it. And the cops, if they have that information, they’re certainly not sharing. In fact, one of the things Furtado says in starting the Wiki crime map was, “This information may or may not exist some place in society, but it’s actually easier for me to try to rebuild it from scratch than to try and get it from the authorities who might have it now.”

Maybe this will succeed or maybe it will fail. The normal case of social software is still failure; most of these experiments don’t pan out. But the ones that do are quite incredible, and I hope that this one succeeds, obviously. But even if it doesn’t, it’s illustrated the point already, which is that someone working alone, with really cheap tools, has a reasonable hope of carving out enough of the cognitive surplus, enough of the desire to participate, enough of the collective goodwill of the citizens, to create a resource you couldn’t have imagined existing even five years ago.

So that’s the answer to the question, “Where do they find the time?” Or, rather, that’s the numerical answer. But beneath that question was another thought, this one not a question but an observation. In this same conversation with the TV producer I was talking about World of Warcraft guilds, and as I was talking, I could sort of see what she was thinking: “Losers. Grown men sitting in their basement pretending to be elves.”

At least they’re doing something.

Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan’s Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don’t? I saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn’t posting at my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list. Now I had an ironclad excuse for not doing those things, which is none of those things existed then. I was forced into the channel of media the way it was because it was the only option. Now it’s not, and that’s the big surprise. However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it’s worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.

And I’m willing to raise that to a general principle. It’s better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, “If you have some sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play this game, too.” And that’s message–I can do that, too–is a big change.

This is something that people in the media world don’t understand. Media in the 20th century was run as a single race–consumption. How much can we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and you’ll consume more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes. But media is actually a triathlon, it ’s three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share.

And what’s astonished people who were committed to the structure of the previous society, prior to trying to take this surplus and do something interesting, is that they’re discovering that when you offer people the opportunity to produce and to share, they’ll take you up on that offer. It doesn’t mean that we’ll never sit around mindlessly watching Scrubs on the couch. It just means we’ll do it less.

And this is the other thing about the size of the cognitive surplus we’re talking about. It’s so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. Let’s say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That’s about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that  is 100 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

I think that’s going to be a big deal. Don’t you?

Well, the TV producer did not think this was going to be a big deal; she was not digging this line of thought. And her final question to me was essentially, “Isn’t this all just a fad?” You know, sort of the flagpole-sitting of the early early 21st century? It’s fun to go out and produce and share a little bit, but then people are going to eventually realize, “This isn’t as good as doing what I was doing before,” and settle down. And I made a spirited argument that no, this wasn’t the case, that this was in fact a big one-time shift, more analogous to the industrial revolution than to flagpole-sitting.

I was arguing that this isn’t the sort of thing society grows out of. It’s the sort of thing that society grows into. But I’m not sure she believed me, in part because she didn’t want to believe me, but also in part because I didn’t have the right story yet. And now I do.

I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she’s going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn’t what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, “What you doing?” And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, “Looking for the mouse.”

Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won’t have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan’s Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.

It’s also become my motto, when people ask me what we’re doing–and when I say “we” I mean the larger society trying to figure out how to deploy this cognitive surplus, but I also mean we, especially, the people in this room, the people who are working hammer and tongs at figuring out the next good idea. From now on, that’s what I’m going to tell them: We’re looking for the mouse. We’re going to look at every place that a reader or a listener or a viewer or a user has been locked out, has been served up passive or a fixed or a canned experience, and ask ourselves, “If we carve out a little bit of the cognitive surplus and deploy it here, could we make a good thing happen?” And I’m betting the answer is yes.

Thank you very much.

Today as ever brand marketers are wrestling with how much of their media spend to put online and are looking for case studies that allow them to “trust digital media” the way they do traditional media.  All of the unique visitor metrics and total impressions numbers aside, there remains a confidence gap until big brands start to circulate big cases where digital has delivered big results.

Now they are starting to come in like this one from Ford published in the WARC News Email:

In April, Ford, the automaker, asked 100 influential US bloggers to test drive its new Fiesta for a period of six months, and regularly post their opinions of the car on portals like Facebook and Twitter.

By October, it estimated that the resulting material had received 4.3 million hits on YouTube and 3 million comments on Twitter, while 540,000 people had viewed photos hosted on Flickr.

According to Jim Farley, Ford’s group vice president of global marketing, recognition rates of the Fiesta have grown rapidly, despite the fact it won’t be available until mid-2010.

“If you would have told me that we would have 100 vehicles in the US … and we would have 60% brand awareness in the segment, I would have said there is no possible way,” he said.

“To get 60% awareness in traditional media, it costs somewhere north of $50 million (€33.6m; £29.9m),” continued Farley, who added that the web is now a viable, and more low-cost, alternative to these channels.

“Online has become mass media. A Yahoo or Google page takeover actually gets more eyeballs than a network TV commercial now. That hasn’t happened before.”

In April, Ford, the automaker, asked 100 influential US bloggers to test drive its new Fiesta for a period of six months, and regularly post their opinions of the car on portals like Facebook and Twitter.

By October, it estimated that the resulting material had received 4.3 million hits on YouTube and 3 million comments on Twitter, while 540,000 people had viewed photos hosted on Flickr.

According to Jim Farley, Ford’s group vice president of global marketing, recognition rates of the Fiesta have grown rapidly, despite the fact it won’t be available until mid-2010.

“If you would have told me that we would have 100 vehicles in the US … and we would have 60% brand awareness in the segment, I would have said there is no possible way,” he said.

“To get 60% awareness in traditional media, it costs somewhere north of $50 million (€33.6m; £29.9m),” continued Farley, who added that the web is now a viable, and more low-cost, alternative to these channels.

“Online has become mass media. A Yahoo or Google page takeover actually gets more eyeballs than a network TV commercial now. That hasn’t happened before.”

Many companies out there are researching digital usage and trying to undersand how we are all using digital technology in our daily lives — but few publish their findings as part of their marketing and brand building effort.  Talk Talk has.

The Digital Anthropology Report 2009 is a well thought out and easy to digest publication. 

Interestingly it also proves an point we’ve all intrinsically believed and is typically referred to by some variant of the pareto rule:  E-ager Beavers that love downloading and reading and searching but can’t be bothered to upload, run a blog or comment heavily like Digital Extroverts are the largest tribe.  And the lurkers outnumber the publishers 3 to 1. 

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 amazign recipe for getting engagement.

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.

Nonetheless we did hope for a bit of activity and we got it.  Over 4700 entries.  Nearly 8 million pageviews with visitors for hundreds of counries.  Facebook groups.  Recruiting votes from local football club forums.  Amazing.

This past week-end the combined teams of the iris London — integrated, Experience and Digital — put on a fun event at the NBA Take to the Streets event at Clapham Common. It was quite a nice integrated event / sponsorship leverage idea which in 2 sec was a Powerade sponsored a freethrow competition. The event was a huge hit and all of the onsite signage and engagement ideas were fantastic, but more importantly, clearly,

check out the basketball tracking robot!

As people took their shots, Noah the robot captured the angle the ball hit the hoop and took a picture of the player which was printed out well adorned with Powerade branding.

http://animoto.com/play/Ildcu3jIotEDGMyRImdmyg?utm_campaign=share_email&utm_medium=email&utm_source=share_email

Reminds us why we are all here – and why we love this business.  Helping our clients to do good fun effective marketing … one robot at a time.

One of my favourite topics is the increasing complexity of media planning and how it is moving towards a search model where it literally is no longer planned in campaigns.  Basically the sophistication of what ad is served where gets so complicated it can only be managed by a computer. 

Automated Media-Buying Platforms Gaining Traction by Mark Walsh, Yesterday, 3:12 PM

As agencies increasingly turn to automated systems to buy media and manage online ad campaigns, more money is flowing to startups that provide that technology. In that vein, digital media-buying platforms MediaMath and Traffiq both announced new venture capital funding Monday.

New York-based MediaMath secured $12.5 million in venture capital and debt financing, with the $10 million venture investment led by Safeguard Scientifics, Inc. and including QED Investors and European Founders Fund. The $2.5 million in debt financing came from Silicon Valley Bank.

Started in 2007, MediaMath says it serves billions of ads per month through its platform on behalf of 20 agencies, including the major holding companies.

Online ad marketplace Traffiq, meanwhile, has raised $10 million in a second-round venture financing led by Grotech Ventures and Greenhill SAVP and including prior investor Court Square Ventures. In connection with the investment, Grotech general partner Steve Fredrick and Greenhill managing director Brian Hirsch have joined the New York-based company’s board of directors.

Last month, New York-based Traffiq announced partnering with Havas Digital to automate online media planning and buying in the agency’s New York, Boston and Chicago offices. Both companies’ systems are designed to help streamline the notoriously outdated process for online media planning and buying that includes faxes and paper notes. The startups are also competing with established players such as Donovan Data Systems and MediaBank in pushing to develop state-of-the-art media-buying systems.

There were a couple of stories recently that remind me why we all have to understand Search.

Search Marketing is Marketing 2.0 on steroids.  It is not just the auction process or sponsored links or automated bid management, it is all of it and the fact that there are no campaigns but instead ongoing optimisation.  And it is constantly changing as engineers re-work their algorithms to make their search platforms work better and decrease search spam.

When you consider  the new concept of Link Intent and the fact that these marketing platforms will sit under our “TV” video viewing and you understand we all have some work to do.

Get ready madison avenue, soon, very soon, all media will be served!

LINK INTENT
Everyone recognises the positioning of a headline is critical.  What happens when the pages you’ve created, your bid strategy and the actual behaviour of searchers impacts whether your ad is shown at all?  Welcome to Link Intent.

Authority, temporal factors, anchor text anomalies, document ranking and relevance, excessive reciprocals, TrustRank and harmonic rank, page segmentation and humans all come into play when search engines determine relevance.

Confused?  Check out this article: Understand How Search Engines Consider Link Intent
or if you are  real glutton for punishment:  Detecting Nepotistic Links by Language Model Disagreement

GOOGLE OFFERES TARGETED TV ADS

MOUNTAIN VIEW, California: Google, the online search giant, has formed a partnership with a technology company that will allow marketers buying cable airtime via its television advertising platform to tailor spots for specific audiences.

It has been argued that Google
has exerted a mixed impact on the advertising, marketing and media industries, although the company was forced into a rare retreat earlier this year when it closed its radio and print ad services.

The internet pioneer has now agreed a tie-up with Visible World, which has developed a system enabling brand owners to “target viewers with real-time offers, products, and creative based on geography, programming, inventory levels, time of day, weather, and other business conditions.”

Such a result is achieved by drawing demographic and other information from cable set-top boxes, which can then be used to alter various aspects of communications, such as the script or promotional offers featured, as appropriate.

Among the other facilities the “intelliSpot” software provides is to allow advertisers to withdraw commercials that are found to be under-performing, and replace them with alternative executions. 

Google will pay Visible World to use this service, which will be made available through its TV Ads portal, described by the Mountain View-based firm as a “flexible, all-digital system for buying more accountable and measurable TV advertising.”

Mike Steib, director of Google TV Ads, argued “audiences are more and more fragmented. One ad with one message for one audience is not the right thing for everyone.”

Lenovo, the IT company, has previously worked with Visible World to run 50 targeted ads containing bespoke offers and links to a campaign website, allowing the company to track results. 

It originally bought the relevant cable inventory using Google TV Ads, and was said to have been one of a number of advertisers which encouraged Google to consider an alliance with Visible World.

CableVision, the cable provider, and DirectTV, the satellite broadcaster, are also both attempting to make inroads into behavioural advertising.

However, Craig Moffet, an analyst with Bernstein Research, recently wrote in a summary to investors that “addressable advertising on cable has been two years away from reality for, oh … about 10 years.”

YouTube, the video-sharing portal owned by Google, is also trialling a new service enabling its content partners to insert ads of their choosing into material they have uploaded to the site.

The FreeWheel ad-serving programme is also used by CBS and Warner Brothers, and effectively means YouTube is part of a broader, third-party ad network for the first time.

Data sourced from Wall Street Journal/Brand Republic; additional content by WARC staff, 29 July 2009

There is always a little trepidation when you are asked to review a piece of work — if the work is horrendous like a lot of it is, then you have to figure out how to tear it to shreds without completely pissing off an entire team, agency and client.

Doing a review of the Doritos iD3 campaign was easy — it is great work.  We all know how hard iit is to get really good interesting projects live and complex ones with a lot of moving parts deserve double credit.

I’m sure that on this one AMV BBDO did a little, Initials did a bunch and are getting the credit, and Rehab Studios have probably killed themselves.   In fact I would guess there is a team inside Rehab that have worked every week-end for 3 months and loved every minute of it.  I have the idea because we did the same for SE Bond and that is what it takes, regardless of budget.

Here are some more links about the campaign:
Rehab Studio’s Blog Post
Inside Facebook Comment
Digital Arts Article

My Review on Brand Republic

By John Baker, promotionsandincentives.co.uk, 27 July 2009, 11:40am

Promo Review – Doritos iD3 promotion

LONDON – “An amazing piece of work” is the view of joint managing director of iris Digital John Baker as he tests out Doritos’ ‘iD3′ campaign.

Every brand manager knows that media has fragmented, consumers are in control and that big headlines like “Try our new flavour! It is new and improved and extra spicy fresh!” get about as much attention as a double glazing salesman in the tropics.  The challenge is what to do.

Doritos new iD3 campaign is a great example of the Brand as Entertainer strategy.

It is an amazing piece of work and really goes well beyond the multi-level online game.  It has a promotion to drive uptake, a brand teaser campaign to build expectation, on pack code integration to drive trial, sophisticated integration of Facebook Connect to make registration easy and extend communication in social networks, a call out to bloggers that talk up the campaign, integration of retail and prize partners to help cover costs – and that is just looking at the surface!

Clearly the game is central to this promotion and it is clear that Doritos have put some real effort into it.  It uses branched video and 3D rendered game levels to keep people interested.  The puzzles are complex enough that it isn’t just a “skills-based question” promotion requirement, but a real effort to challenge the audience which assuming it is younger and familiar with gaming should work incredibly well.  For people that use Facebook Connect, personal content is brought into the game to make it more relevant, and achieve the techie cool factor.

What remains to be seen is if the campaign is central to the brand advertising that is always the heartland of FMCG launches.  Will the advertising drive people to the game?  Will the winners feature in the advertising? Will mass media be used to offer clues that are critical to success?  This is incredibly hard to achieve but if it happens it would put this campaign in the leagues of RBK’s Whodonit and Microsoft’s Vanishing Point. These campaigns were also fully integrated using DM packs for engaged participants and events to generate even more buzz.

The only challenge for the campaign — which probably has the brand planners hopping in circles — is the connection between the idea of “identity theft” that drives the game and a new lime and curry flavoured crisp which is the product.  The crisps do feature in the movies and the game but it is hard to demonstrate food product features and benefits in games.

All that said, there will be a lot of gamers out there fully entertained and talking up Doritos.  And assuming the crisps taste great, we can be sure they’ll tell their friends and the whole lot of them will all buy lots of Doritos.

Promo score:  8 out 10

Agency: Initials