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Here is a an abstract from a recent study by IBM: “Beyond advertising: Choosing a strategic path to the digital consumer.”

Yes, even the boffins at IBM have an extremely valuable point of view – more value perhaps that many industry commentators from directly within media and Entertainment.

Thanks to Michael Gass for bringing it to my attention.

Abstract

Digital formats such as social media, online video, mobile communications, gaming and advanced TV enable companies to simultaneously meet transactional and brand-building objectives. Four primary trends blur the boundaries between traditional brand advertising and direct marketing:

* Consumer adoption of new distribution formats – Consumer behavior has changed forever: They are more digital-savvy, willing to provide personal information in return for perceived value, and increasingly ready for permission-based advertising.
* A shift in advertiser spend – Spending is moving from traditional advertising toward measurable, interactive marketing. Combined with spending contraction in the new economic environment, this requires smarter advertising, and doing more with less.
* Digital migration of platforms – Traditional boundaries are fading, creating opportunities for innovative business models for content platforms.
* Emergence of new capabilities – Game-changing moves, by both new entrants and existing players, are driving new types of industry innovation, challenging existing business models and accelerating the pace of change.

In response, media and entertainment (M&E) companies need to move beyond traditional advertising: the scenario of the future is consumer centricity. Becoming consumer centric requires a combination of granularity – the ability to target desired consumers while measuring results – with cross-platform integration.

Yet content owners, media distributors and agencies have not sufficiently responded to these changes, partly due to significant hurdles. Investment decisions are being hindered by new format uncertainty; the lack of cross-industry standards across formats, processes and especially metrics; and significant internal challenges including siloed operating models that limit delivery of cross-platform campaigns and a “data glut” that fails to provide real insight.

Enabling consumer-centric marketing
No matter where M&E companies focus first as they move toward consumer-centric marketing, they must start now to test new models. By combining elements of granularity – from impressions to insight – and cross-platform integration, four distinct business models will continue to evolve over the next five years (see Figure 1).

Regardless of the chosen path, being competitive and overcoming substantial hurdles will require a fundamental change in capabilities. New capabilities across four areas hold paramount importance as traditional advertising gives way to consumer centricity: creative, insights, collaboration and workflow.

* Creative – From media-centric development to cross-platform innovation. This requires experimentation across platforms and consumer participation in the creative process.
* Insights – From disparate data to greater insights. The future requires insights to be seamless and more granular, leveraging tools such as integrated campaign dashboards to enable decision making.
* Collaboration – From proprietary models to open collaboration. A new set of partnerships – such as peer collaboration between cable companies or content collaboration with ad networks – is needed across the evolving ecosystem to exploit opportunities, enable scale benefits and deliver efficiencies.
* Workflow – From manual and analog to automated and digital processes. New tools and applications can deliver end-to-end processes, from automated micro-versioning to digital inventory optimization.

As the industry heads toward consumer centricity, participants are taking divergent evolutionary paths based on their legacy stronghold positions. How quickly any company reaches consumer centricity will depend on its starting point, business mix and its ability to innovate. Most will likely start by focusing either on deepening their ROI capabilities, or driving cross-platform integration, rather than both. But even companies picking a more deliberate, gradual strategy need to explore new models along both dimensions now to sustain and protect their revenue in the future.

However, there are a few new features:

1. The images auto-scroll form the start to
2. You get the name and the price of the product upfront rather than having to click on the image
3. You can expand the information box to show more information about the product
4. There’s a new sale price field, so you could see £’s slashed off the price of many products very soon
5. As I said, it’s small enough to be ad-served and we hope to stream video into it in the near future

If you have any comments, good or bad, please spend a moment to type them in below.

Coolafone will swap your old mobile phones for stuff that you want. It might be a the new Kings Of Leon album, a luxury Christmas food hamper or a garden fork. The idea is that you swap your phones for “cool credits” which you can collect and swap for goods. So what have we got to do with these guys? Well, we produced a set of banners which are being served by The Digital Tribe over Atlas. The banners have been built on the proprietary OPEN IMUâ„¢ format, which enables dynamic content managed by the client through the OPEN CMS. The new ads will be appearing in the new year.

Over 230 entries were received so we’re pretty delighted to have been shortlisted.

The OPEN IMU is a new online display media format that is causing quite a stir – and rightly so.  Click through rates are more than 23% and average time spent more than 3 mins across all platforms on the current campaign.

When one considers that average click through rates across all formats are 0.25% (that almost ZERO!) the OPEN IMU really is a genuine innovation.

And this is only the tip of the iceberg…..stay tuned for more game changing info..

See the nominations for the e-consultancy innovation awards 2009 here:

http://www.e-consultancy.com/awards/shortlist.asp

Joshua Rex

Quite a few brands have made what they thought were bold steps into this new realm of communications and many of them have been disappointed by the results. In our experience, this is because most have been too nervous to put up enough budget to run fully integrated social media campaigns, which include applications, widgets, blogs, pr, seeding and natural search amongst other tools and techniques. Sometimes they have simply hired a technical house to execute an ill-prepared and unplanned in-house idea that is not part of an integrated social media strategy.

There have been plenty of examples of Facebook and other social utility applications, widgets and blogs that have all worked independently and failed to live up to the much-hyped expectations in terms of ROI. This has been potentially very damaging to a fledgling industry which promises so much insight, return and success if handled properly.

There are rewarding times ahead for brands that are brave but educated in their approach to social media. If they adopt and commission a decent amount of research into developing their own particular social media strategy they will start to turn heads and open eyes and ears.

It appears that this special report only published half the headline. Surely the full copy should have read “Keeping one step ahead – taking two steps backwards”.

Online advertising models have been by and large appallingly dismal at responding to or keeping up with changes in internet usage and behaviour.  Lets look at the facts. Click through rates have been declining for years, whist at the same time the cost of online media has been growing exponentially. Not a great formula for successful, cut through communications. Click-through rates for ads on major Web destinations such as Yahoo! and Microsoft declined from 0.75% to 0.27% during 2006, according to Eyeblaster. The average click rate on standard banner ads across the whole Web was 0.2% through last year.

Dynamic display ads, flash heavy intrusive pops ups, MPU’s, sky scrappers and the like really don’t address the issue. Whilst some great creative has been executed through such formats, it really is a case of mutton dressed up as lamb with regards to communications effectiveness.

We firmly believe that the most progressive brands are bypassing the browser and the inbox and communicating with consumers directly on the desktop. Targeted communication through our desktop application delivers click- through rates of between 30-80%. The recent desktop application we produced for Euro 2008 in France received over 150,000 downloads in the first week. Just about every one of these users is open and receptive to highly targeted communications delivered directly to the desktop. Oh, and let’s not forget that such an approach omits the need to over invest in hugely expensive online media.

The desktop is the most valuable real estate in media today. The smartest brands are on to this. Tie this into social…things get very interesting indeed!

If a brand has content that a user is willing to opt-in to, why waste time wielding a shotgun when you can have a snipers rifle at your disposal.

Direct to desktop communication is the future…now.