Digital Hive

ADTECH FULL FRONTAL: Is real time the new prime time?

Turning up the heat on marketing campaigns by turning up the spend on prime time TV is fast losing its oomph. Instead, we all need to start dialing up the live and real time aspects of a campaign to generate impact. That’s where the new marketing energy can be found.

There are lots of examples of media programming and campaigns that use a sense of live urgency – a perishable not to be missed experience - to generate interest and keep an audience. Whether it’s a real time promotion like My Wishlist for American Express during the holiday season or the ever increasing importance of big live sports events or the live aspects and audience participation in many reality TV show formats, real time urgency helps stop marketing and programming go cold or disappear into the long tail of fragmented excess.

The live nature of the web in terms of social networks is another dimension for dialing up the heat of a campaign. TV used to be a social network too, when we all watched the same programmes at the same time. Now it’s the networked nature of users online that can create shared experiences and extend a campaign’s reach.

If live is one side of the real time coin, then on-demand is the other. When customers do nowadays want to talk to a brand or want content about a brand, we better make damn sure we are there for them in real time where and when they want us. This means more money spent listening and responding to customers rather than pushing ourselves onto them. I guess prime time also now means your time. As Mark Burnett said recently, the new prime time is 9 to 5 when people are at their computers.

Finally, behavioral targeting is surely another example of the shift from old world analogue mass marketing to a real time digital approach that’s big still in terms of its ultimate reach but not mass.

- Mark Beeching, Digitas Chief Creative Officer

ADTECH FULL FRONTAL: Convergence - is it really divergence?

What has happened to convergence?

In the future, we were told, we will all be watching radio on our phones. Enter iPod. A single use device for listening to music. Sure, now you can watch videos and play games on it too. But it’s still a proprietary format. And the movies don’t look good plugged into a 52 inch plasma.

So what did we mean when we talked about convergence in the future tense? Not really sure. But I think what has happened is things have not all converged. Sure some devices have merged and morphed. But there are just as many devices as before if not more.

The difference is that more of them talk to each other. To the point that even your sports shoe can talk to your nano now. But that’s surely not convergence. And no one is making phone calls with their shoes yet.

The other big development is the fact that content itself has become much more liquid. Far from all content ending up on a singular converged device, the same content can be served up on multiple devices – off your DVR onto your computer or off your computer onto your TV screen or phone and so on.

So content is liquid and devices are interconnected. Convergence? Divergence? Dunno.

- Mark Beeching, Digitas Chief Creative Officer

ADTECH FULL FRONTAL: User generated content - is it just a fad?

In the late 1950s, the early heyday of advertising, there was a fad for competitions that got consumers to write jingles. Earlier this year Dreamworks made a movie about a housewife who supports her constantly new improved family lifestyle through nothing but winning these competitions. As it says on the movie poster, “She raised ten kids on twenty five words or less.” No wonder copywriters have such a nostalgia for the old advertising model!

So, is the latest excitement over user generated content a fad or here to day?

Here to stay, of course, whether marketers like it or not. You can’t leave the customer out of your media mix any more. They will have their say one way or another. But beware. See Christine Beardsell’s post in the Digital Hive on how to and how not to go about using users in your campaign.

- Mark Beeching, Digitas Chief Creative Officer

ADTECH FULL FRONTAL: Brand content - will it replace the ad?

As it becomes harder and harder for advertisers to grab the attention of viewers and users, more and more interest and brand dollars seem to be turning toward brand content. Don’t interrupt the show, be part of it. Or even create and own the content or channel outright yourself. One way or another, marketers have to try harder to earn attention with their brand dollars and not just pay to interrupt content with brand messages.

Brand content ranges from product placement on shows like The Apprentice or Queer Eye to virally distributed brand films to full blown entertainment programming such as the proposal to create BUD.TV or Amazon’s intention to make a movie for itself.

The creative challenge is finding a natural fit between content and the product or service you are looking to promote, otherwise this is just back to the old world of soaps created by P&G as a vehicle for the sponsor’s message.

A better model from the past might be the Tour de France, cleverly conceived and created in 1903 by the Parisian daily sports paper l’Equipe to drive daily reading habits and national sales as the tour passed throughout the country.

The other factor fueling all the interest in brand content is the seemingly imminent collapse of the old production and distribution hierarchies. George Lucas tells us he is going to give the movie theatres a miss in the future and distribute content by other means. Wall Street, in putting more and more money directly into movie production, seems able to skirt round the studios altogether; Joel Silver of Lethal Weapon and Matrix fame has just cut a deal to do exactly this. Morgan Freeman and Intel have re-announced the intention to make a movie together and release it online as well as in theatres. David Porter, the man in charge of DVDs at Wal-Mart and who happens to sell $17 billion of them a year, is up at arms at Disney and Apple for making movies available on iTunes. What is going on?

As another Porter put it, Cole Porter, in the world of movies meet the networks meet the web meet Wall Street, it seems like nowadays “Anything Goes.” Brands need to get in the game.

- Mark Beeching, Digitas Chief Creative Officer

ADTECH FULL FRONTAL: Online advertising - life after the 468

We’ve come a long ways since our Digitas’ sister agency Modem created the world’s first online banner for AT&T in October 1994:

(click to view full size)

Not so long ago, prompted by the advent of broadband and new rich media possibilities for online advertising, there was a lot of discussion about what the “ad unit of the future” would be online. I guess the thinking was that more or less one unit (the 30 second spot) had sufficed for long enough on telly, so why should we need more than one video style ad unit online. Truth is, a lot of people were simply looking for ways of posting a tv spot online with a bit of interactivity around it.

It hasn’t played out that way, of course. In so far as there is a dominant online ad unit, I guess that would have to be paid search. Meanwhile the forms of online advertising continue to proliferate and develop, and much of the creativity now goes into choosing a format and constant innovation, not just perfecting a standard formula.

I like to think the real change going on is not the shift to a standard unit, but the move away from interruptive messaging altogether. In the UK, for example, while overall ad spending online is going up at an annual rate of 40%, the spend on pop-ups and the like is going down at the rate of almost 10% a year and now accounts for less than 1% of all online budgets. At least we now know that the interruptive push marketer’s favourite ad unit is an ad unit of the past.

- Mark Beeching, Digitas Chief Creative Officer