Digital Hive

"Scooby Doo where are you?"

My three and a half year old is the first of a totally TiVo generation. If we run out of TiVo’d Scooby Doos and have to watch “live” TV it’s a nightmare. “Daddy, the telly is broken, I can’t fast forward through the commercials!! Aaaaaaaaah! Where's Scooby?” There is no way I can explain to her the concept that we HAVE TO sit through this interruption to her show. Tantrums follow. Three and a half year olds know when they are being marketed at rather than having their attention earned by brands.

So I turned to the media diva for some more robust stats on the TiVo DVR trend. Devon O'Donnell duly forwarded this report to Digital Hive from Tobi Elkin, Executive Editor of MediaPost.

Lipstick on the piggy?

An article in today's Wall Street Journal online edition by Brian Sternberg raises an interesting question:

Can TV networks get consumers to connect more with content and the marketers who subsidize it by adding "value adds" like web chat, DVD wrappers, and web streaming to their existing TV spot offerings?

Avid gamers - what are they about?

Check out this man on the street video of gamers talking about what motivates them. Interesting insights about these 20-somethings include:

• They liken gaming to getting lost in a book - specifically, how it stimulates your imagination
• They seem active and engaged with life - not just passively drifting through a video-laced haze
• Gaming can be social - they play with partners/friends

Who are we advertising at anyway?

Credit where credit is due to Seth Godin. His ideas are simple yet powerful.  In his latest book, the provocatively entitled "all marketers are liars", Seth highlights the importance of telling a convincing story about your brand. According to Seth, the actual facts are far less important than telling a good yarn that fits into the audience's existing world-view. This might seem obvious (it is kind of obvious), but some advertisers do a much better job of this than others.

But why is that? Why do some companies tell such rich and compelling stories and why do others not? There is probably no single answer to this question, but some of the time, I suspect,  companies are actually conversing with themselves, not their customers.  If you think that sounds kind of crazy, that's because it is.  But that doesn't mean that it is not happening.

Do online ad units for video make interactive sense?

Digitas media diva Devon O’Donnell sent me this provocative piece from MediaPost’s Online SPIN – ‘controversy served fresh daily’ is the tag line. It’s by Cory Treffiletti, senior vice president and managing director at Carat Interactive San Francisco. The article is part of a debate close to my heart: we can’t just port over to the web 30 second and 60 second spots and think that’s interactive advertising because you can click stuff around it. We need to find new ways of integrating the power of film into ‘lean forward’ active branding experiences – ways that earn attention and create value for the user not just ambush them. There’s certainly a role for placing video into existing ad spaces but new media can play host to some very old and outmoded marketing habits. Read on:

"Streaming video is hot right now,” Writes Treffiletti, “and it's only getting hotter as broadband becomes more pervasive. I get to sit in many discussions that deal with this topic and in one of those conversations I had an epiphany as to how it gets sold in to clients, and I thought I'd share my epiphany with you.

We all know that TV is the most emotionally impactful media form currently available. TV is unmatched in its ability to convey an emotional message, but TV is also a passive medium. Interactive is the medium that affords the most opportunity for dialogue. It is the "lean-forward" medium, compared to TV which is a "lean-back" medium. Streaming video, and other forms of online video, offer the best of both worlds. It offers the emotion of television, coupled with the interactivity and opportunity for dialogue that comes from the Web.

All of that being said, I still don't think we have seen what will eventually become the norm.

The way video is currently viewed online still seems somewhat clunky. It feels as though we're trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. If you see the current executions, we're placing video into existing ad spaces. We're pushing video into banners and buttons rather than coming up with new presentation architecture. We need to re-evaluate how we see the Web and how we place video inside of it.

What about a site that is purely a video interface? What about typing in a URL and coming to a TV station? Does the future hold the possibility of a pure video interface with flash layered on top? Companies like Maven and Desksite offer experiences that are similar to this but are housed on your desktop rather than online. Why can't we foresee this experience online as well?

The promise of video is one that will certainly be fulfilled online, and will likely change dramatically before we see this fulfillment. I am really interested to see how video will be incorporated over the next two years. Once dial-up is a thing of the past, of course. Aren't you? “

Devon comments that this article speaks to a shared creative challenge and media planning puzzle. It illustrates well the need for collaborative marketing creativity that straddles both the creative and media capabilities at Digitas.

Stranger than fiction

Sometimes truth really is stranger than fiction.  If we ever needed confirmation of that, then we get it in spades from Danny Wallace, who, wait for it,  accidentally started a global cult.  It seems that our friend Danny was bored and unemployed one day and decided to place an ad in Loot (free pages), asking people to Join Me. All that was needed to become a joinee was to mail Danny a passport-sized picture of yourself.

You can probably already guess how this one ends.  Much to Danny's surprise, thousands of people wanted to join, even though they (and Danny) were not really all that sure what they were joining.  People clearly thought it was funny and interesting enough to "tell a friend", explaining how one small ad triggered it all off.

Thinking quickly on his feet, Danny invented a reason: the basic idea was that people would join him in agreeing perpetrate random acts of kindness every Friday (in the style of Kevin Spacey's pay it forward).

What followed was an international phenomenon, with Danny visting Australia, Norway, Belgium, the US and god-knows-where-else to persuade people to join him.  He is now, by his own admission, a cult leader, able to draw upon his international Karma Army to perpetrate random acts of kindness.

But why on earth would people do this?  I think it is about human desire for togetherness, to be part of something bigger than themselves.  At the same time, Danny is an appealing leader because he is not taking power from people, he is empowering them.  Marketers might do well to recognise this simple truth.  Empower your customers and they will lavish their attention on you.  I think we should stop calling people consumers, its too passive. Danny has shown us that people want to be Participants, they want to feel empowered. That is what Danny is offering, his form of 'leadership' does not involve taking power away from anybody.  That is why Danny appeals to us.

Truth is really stranger than fiction.  Read all about in Danny's Book

   

I'm not sure what this has to do with Marketing but...

As consumers assert more control over media and messaging, it seems like an important POV.
This is from June 15th's NY Times OpEd page and written by Pulitzer Prize winner Stacy Schiff:

The Interactive Truth

It used to be that the longest unprotected border in the world was that between the United States and Canada. Today it's the one between fact and fiction. If the two cozy up any closer together The National Enquirer will be out of business.

More than 60 percent of the American people don't trust the press. Why should they? They've been reading "The Da Vinci Code" and marveling at its historical insights. I have nothing against a fine thriller, especially one that claims the highest of literary honors: it's a movie on the page. But "The Da Vinci Code" is not a work of nonfiction. If one more person talks to me about Dan Brown's crackerjack research I'm shooting on sight.

The future is open!

Mark Beeching has been talking to many of us lately about the internet-driven trend towards open source in many areas of our lives. Doubting Thomas' should look no further than Skype for a profound and surprising development in this regard.  Skype allows anybody in the Skype network to call anybody else in the Skype network, anywhere in the world, without cost. 

The key to how it does this (with next to no infrastructure) is at the heart of the open source mindset; when people join skype, they donate their un-used computer processor power to the skype network, which uses it for routing calls.  If that sounds fishy to you, please bear in mind that Skpe has 41 million users and that it is growing at a rate of 150,000 a day.

New Improved Media Formula, now with 25% more customer engagement!

The rumour mill was in high gear this morning as speculation mounted about further cuts in "upfront" US TV advertising spending from the world's largest media buyer, P&G.  While such cuts do not preclude P&G from buying TV time on the spot market, it does hint at a growing downward price pressure on TV spots as advertisers begin to act on the declining effectiveness of TV advertising.

For those of you who follow P&G, this should not come as a huge surprise.  P&G's senior leadership have been public about their beliefs that the advertising industry is reacting too slowly to trends that increasingly put consumers in charge (for those with Wall Street Journal archives acess, see the article "P&G Chief's Turnaround Recipe: Find Out What Women Want" for more on this). 

A reduction in TV spend, in favor of other media, and interactive media in particular, is a logical extension of this rhetoric.  The big question on my mind is, how, exactly, will they spend this money?  It's hard to see P&G, a group that was built on advertising, radically reducing their overall spend in the area, so it will be interesting to see who (and what) gets the lion's share of those dollars in the future.

Given that consumers are increasingly empowered to select which content they view, that money would be well spent on content that consumers actively want to see: a tall order for a group that sells detergents and tootpaste, but by no means insurmountable.  One thing is sure: where P&G treads, many others will surely follow.

The Internet is the New Black

My week began with a rather depressing hypothetical question, “When it comes to digital marketing, do we have to go back before we go forward?”

A colleague of my husband’s had been lamenting the fact just this weekend that “We used to do really cool work, and now all our clients want to do is put their TV ads online”.  Then I attended the Yahoo! “It’s a Broadband Life” conference in Boston where it was hypothesized that we should look to the involvement of Jeff Zucker in the Internet for his great television expertise - that we all can learn a thing or two from television as broadband penetration skyrockets among Internet users.

It wasn’t until this morning in the Wall Street Journal’s article on the return of black to fall fashion that it started to really come together for me.  It’s a simple choice we have to make (bear with me here).