What a fantastic article in Ad Age by the hand of Matthew Szymczyk.
There is little that I can add to it and judging by the number of comments on his post, a lot a people seem to have a strong opinion about how marketers and agencies are using Augmented Reality.
I have seen this happen time after time again. (Digital) technology being hyped and used without any link to marketing objectives. What is driving that?
Three potential causes:
1. the 'trendy marketer' briefing his digital shop to 'do an AR campaign', demonstrating that his/her brand is contemporary and understands today's consumers.
2. the digital shop selling solutions that are fun to do through fear: 'this is the new thing, everybody is doing this, if you don't do this you are being sooo old school!'
3. A combination of 1 and 2
The solution:
1. put your consumer's needs central
2. define smart business and communication objectives
3. as an agency and as a marketer judge any technology solution by its capability to help achieve the business objectives and put yourself in the place of the consumer.
The video examples demonstrate that AR has a lot of potential. Click on the title to see more.
Friday, December 11, 2009
Survival of the fitest
WARC reports on a research conducted by Forrester that was designed to understand what agencies we employ in the digital space.
Results of the research should not come as a surprise. This is my take out.
What it tells us is that we have come at a crucial phase in the evolution of species. The old, monolith species are being challenged by new, nimble and more specialised ones.
Advertisers like the old species because they know and understand brands and are a one stop shop. Yet, they also like the new one because they have the specialised skills and in depth understanding of digital that the old species do not have.
What species will survive?
Personally I don't think this is a case of either/or. In order to survive the monoliths will need to become a conglomerate of small and nimble. The challenge being, how to connect the dots so as to offer an integrated solution to customers. This will be an on going evolution: new media will continue to emerge and with them new service providers.
If the monoliths don't offer the services, customers will turn to the specialised shops.
The old species will have been warned: go to sleep and you'll never wake up again. You need to remain vigilant all the time, ready to adapt to the changing environment and the challenges of the new species.
I wonder what Darwin would have to say about this?
Results of the research should not come as a surprise. This is my take out.
What it tells us is that we have come at a crucial phase in the evolution of species. The old, monolith species are being challenged by new, nimble and more specialised ones.
Advertisers like the old species because they know and understand brands and are a one stop shop. Yet, they also like the new one because they have the specialised skills and in depth understanding of digital that the old species do not have.
What species will survive?
Personally I don't think this is a case of either/or. In order to survive the monoliths will need to become a conglomerate of small and nimble. The challenge being, how to connect the dots so as to offer an integrated solution to customers. This will be an on going evolution: new media will continue to emerge and with them new service providers.
If the monoliths don't offer the services, customers will turn to the specialised shops.
The old species will have been warned: go to sleep and you'll never wake up again. You need to remain vigilant all the time, ready to adapt to the changing environment and the challenges of the new species.
I wonder what Darwin would have to say about this?
Friday, December 4, 2009
lean back surfing
If you thought surfers are a lean forward active and engaged crowd, you're wrong.
Judging from the Google Zeitgeist 2009, surfers are really lazy.
How else can you explain that many of the fastest growing search terms are social networks related? Rather than typing 'Facebook.com' in their browser, they type 'facebook' on Google, to click through.
Not convinced by my argument? In Belgium 'Google' ranks amongst the fastest growing search terms on ...Google. Two possible explanations: those folks are completely crazy (not to be excluded completely) or they are plain lazy.
Between crazy and lazy, based upon my own experience I choose the latter (you would not expect me to admit I'm crazy, would you?).
I have a search bar open all the time and rather than opening my browser and typing in the url, I just type in the search term and click through from within Google. I actually do this quite often to surf to sites that I visit on a regular basis and where I know that Google will enable me to click through to the page that is of interest to me rather than having to navigate through the site, which is much more time consuming.
Now that I come to think of it, i actually do this several times per day and it would consist of the majority of my 'Search' activity. I realize that this is n=1 and that this is probably not a solid enough sample size to explain global search behaviour.
So it would be interesting to find out how people do actually search and what % of search is real search vs using Google as a 'guide'. Behaviour of one vs the other is different. If I search, than I will consider the different options. In the other case, I can almost blindly click through to the exact site or page I am looking for...
I would really be interested to see the absolute numbers and the top ranking search tersm, rather than trends. I believe MSN publish absolute numbers...
Judging from the Google Zeitgeist 2009, surfers are really lazy.
How else can you explain that many of the fastest growing search terms are social networks related? Rather than typing 'Facebook.com' in their browser, they type 'facebook' on Google, to click through.
Not convinced by my argument? In Belgium 'Google' ranks amongst the fastest growing search terms on ...Google. Two possible explanations: those folks are completely crazy (not to be excluded completely) or they are plain lazy.
Between crazy and lazy, based upon my own experience I choose the latter (you would not expect me to admit I'm crazy, would you?).
I have a search bar open all the time and rather than opening my browser and typing in the url, I just type in the search term and click through from within Google. I actually do this quite often to surf to sites that I visit on a regular basis and where I know that Google will enable me to click through to the page that is of interest to me rather than having to navigate through the site, which is much more time consuming.
Now that I come to think of it, i actually do this several times per day and it would consist of the majority of my 'Search' activity. I realize that this is n=1 and that this is probably not a solid enough sample size to explain global search behaviour.
So it would be interesting to find out how people do actually search and what % of search is real search vs using Google as a 'guide'. Behaviour of one vs the other is different. If I search, than I will consider the different options. In the other case, I can almost blindly click through to the exact site or page I am looking for...
I would really be interested to see the absolute numbers and the top ranking search tersm, rather than trends. I believe MSN publish absolute numbers...
Thursday, December 3, 2009
Getting bored? Social media again
In Sites Consulting conducted a rather massive research about on line, trying to understand who is on line and what people really do.
The created this on line video to advertise their research, which in itself is rather interesting.
As usual, it triggered some thoughts:
Firstly, as a brand it is indeed about joining the conversation, it is not about Twitter or Facebook as the new advertising channel.
Secondly, the conclusion says it all: to some extend we can see what is happening, yet we don't know how to use it.
I believe the latter is extremely challenging:
Firstly because there is little margin for error: Errors can spread quickly and at a global level.
Secondly because social media prove to be rather volatile: by the time you grasp how to use them for marketing purposes, they will have changed, evolved, or might have been replaced by the next new hype.
Click on the title to watch the video
The created this on line video to advertise their research, which in itself is rather interesting.
As usual, it triggered some thoughts:
Firstly, as a brand it is indeed about joining the conversation, it is not about Twitter or Facebook as the new advertising channel.
Secondly, the conclusion says it all: to some extend we can see what is happening, yet we don't know how to use it.
I believe the latter is extremely challenging:
Firstly because there is little margin for error: Errors can spread quickly and at a global level.
Secondly because social media prove to be rather volatile: by the time you grasp how to use them for marketing purposes, they will have changed, evolved, or might have been replaced by the next new hype.
Click on the title to watch the video
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
social media...again
Social media from a different perspective...
Interesting article by the hand of Taddy Hall in Ad Age explaining Twitter's decline.
My understanding is the following: Twitter was hyping as a result of it's newness and the fact that the 'currency' is the number of followers you have. Since we now realize that followers do not mean anything, unless they really actualy do follow, number of users are going down.
If that's true for Twitter, what does that mean for Facebook. I was an 'early adopter' and used to collect friends as a proof of well, euh popularity probably. After some months of active use, I've come to realize that I don't care of what over half of these friends are doing, since they are no real friends in real life.
As a result, I stopped using Facebook to connect with my real friends and actually virtually stopped accepting invites.
Technically I am one one the 300 million users. In reality however...
Based on n = 1. Will Facebook be victim of it's success, much the way Twitter seems to have become victim of it's own hype?
Interesting article by the hand of Taddy Hall in Ad Age explaining Twitter's decline.
My understanding is the following: Twitter was hyping as a result of it's newness and the fact that the 'currency' is the number of followers you have. Since we now realize that followers do not mean anything, unless they really actualy do follow, number of users are going down.
If that's true for Twitter, what does that mean for Facebook. I was an 'early adopter' and used to collect friends as a proof of well, euh popularity probably. After some months of active use, I've come to realize that I don't care of what over half of these friends are doing, since they are no real friends in real life.
As a result, I stopped using Facebook to connect with my real friends and actually virtually stopped accepting invites.
Technically I am one one the 300 million users. In reality however...
Based on n = 1. Will Facebook be victim of it's success, much the way Twitter seems to have become victim of it's own hype?
Social media, but different this time
I find myself talking way too lot about social media.
Why is that? Agreeably they're big and attract large crowds, but the again, is 300 million users on FB really that big if you compare to total global population?
Reason why I talk a lot about social media is because a lot of articles are being published about social media that trigger thoughts. So again today: I found this article in Warc about Coke being the best user of Facebook, followed by Starbucks. Not sure what the criteria are. If it is total number of fans, than hell yeah, Coke should by far be biggest and best since it has by far a bigger user base than Starbucks.
No, what attracted by attention is the clever way Starbucks are using Facebook: to distribute coupons for their ice cream! It serves at least 3 objectives. they reward their fans on FB, which I assume are loyal consumers. They sample a new product line, generating at the same time traffic to their stores.
This is what separates the men from the boys. This is real marketing, not just playing around and experimenting. That's social media as part of an integrated marketing strategy and not just social media for the sake of social media. Starbucks, I am impressed.
Why is that? Agreeably they're big and attract large crowds, but the again, is 300 million users on FB really that big if you compare to total global population?
Reason why I talk a lot about social media is because a lot of articles are being published about social media that trigger thoughts. So again today: I found this article in Warc about Coke being the best user of Facebook, followed by Starbucks. Not sure what the criteria are. If it is total number of fans, than hell yeah, Coke should by far be biggest and best since it has by far a bigger user base than Starbucks.
No, what attracted by attention is the clever way Starbucks are using Facebook: to distribute coupons for their ice cream! It serves at least 3 objectives. they reward their fans on FB, which I assume are loyal consumers. They sample a new product line, generating at the same time traffic to their stores.
This is what separates the men from the boys. This is real marketing, not just playing around and experimenting. That's social media as part of an integrated marketing strategy and not just social media for the sake of social media. Starbucks, I am impressed.
Monday, November 30, 2009
What we can learn from the agming industry?
Yet another interesting article on Ad Age.
Not for the reason that a video game now hit all the entertainment industry box office records. We knew they could do that; we know wince a long time that the gaming industry is big, big business, bigger actually than the movie industry.
Not for the reason that the video game is moving closer to the movie industry in terms of look and feel of the graphics.
No, it's interesting because it proves that mass marketing works.
Here you have a bunch of gaming guys that go like, hey, we have a property that has the potential to appeal to a broader audience, let's mass market it, whilst not forgetting about our core target groups. So they do, some game footage serves as a TVC (cheap to produce too) and before they know, the game is the biggest hit ever.
In the meantime proving that TV still is a very effective medium, even against (non hard core) gamers. And cleverly adapting their plan to reach hard core gamers too, proving that social media have a role too, as long as it is not bolted on, but used for a reason.
No rocket science, all common sense. Well done chaps!
As usualy, clicking on the title will give you more detail.
Not for the reason that a video game now hit all the entertainment industry box office records. We knew they could do that; we know wince a long time that the gaming industry is big, big business, bigger actually than the movie industry.
Not for the reason that the video game is moving closer to the movie industry in terms of look and feel of the graphics.
No, it's interesting because it proves that mass marketing works.
Here you have a bunch of gaming guys that go like, hey, we have a property that has the potential to appeal to a broader audience, let's mass market it, whilst not forgetting about our core target groups. So they do, some game footage serves as a TVC (cheap to produce too) and before they know, the game is the biggest hit ever.
In the meantime proving that TV still is a very effective medium, even against (non hard core) gamers. And cleverly adapting their plan to reach hard core gamers too, proving that social media have a role too, as long as it is not bolted on, but used for a reason.
No rocket science, all common sense. Well done chaps!
As usualy, clicking on the title will give you more detail.
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