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Enough already about how kids don’t get twitter and won’t use twitter, all is a matter of time.

Take for example:

MySpace: made possible by kids (blew it focusing too much on music however the twitter tie up is smart

Facebook: ditto – made possible kids (a tad older yet from dorm room to every bedroom)

Twitter: for sure

End of story chart courtesy of Silicon Valley Insider – Chart of the Day

Only just discovered this little beauty utility the other day.

https://twitter.com/chartoftheday

http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day

We already posted a few articles on this blog relating to behavioural targeting. Our stance remains unchanged. Behavioural targeting fails to address 2 fundamental issues:

1) It doesn’t not address true engagement. Just because I have visited a camera website doesn’t mean I am in the market for a new camera.

2) It dose zilch to address the underlying problem online advertising ineffectiveness: the display media formats themselves.

Rupert Neate, over at the Telegraph, posted an article in support of Phorm – Websites should back Phorm as it could be the answer to monetising the internet

Rupert, along with many other pundits such as Ben Kunz at Media Associates, drum up the excitement around behavioural. It seems to me to be a case of “At least it better than what we have now”. Well, I’m a big believer in the old adage that you can’t polish a turd. Instead of trying to make existing ads more tageted, we need to fundamentally re-design the online display media formats themselves.

The Open IMU display media format is a god start. On a recent 1 month campaign we delivered the following results:

Views (Impressions): 750,000+. This represents a 50%+ uplift on impressions bought.
Unique visitors: 200,000+
New installs: 2,500+ installs (The number of unique users who have ‘grabbed’ and installed the IMU
Average Interaction Rate (Interaction is counted each time a user mouses over the IMU for more than 1 second): 30.99%. Facebook 91.59%, Twitter 70%, Google Modules 66.67%, Blogspot 33.94%
Average Clicked View Rate (A unique count of the number of Views where the visitor clicked on the IMU) :11.29%. mydeco 31.94%, Facebook 53.27%, myspace 24.56%, Blogspot 13.20%
CPCV (the average number of Clicks per Clicked View): 8.76
Average time spent (the amount of time that the IMU was loaded on a page): 00:01:16. Goggle Modules 00:07:46, mydeco 00:00:60, Blogspot 00:00:31, Facebook 00:02:05
Average interaction time (the amount of time that the visitor spent interacting with the widget – mousing over or clicking): 00:00:12

We see the way forward as consumer’s opting-in to content and utilities – delivered by brands. Of course this won’t necessarily be the right approach for every brand and every campaign – but it’s one huge step forward.

Follow this and other ramblings on twitter.

For those of you that can’t recall Hans Christian Andersen “The Emperor’s New Clothes”…..video below. Why is it that adults tend to have to more learn from children’s stories that the children themselves?

Consolidating its position at the cutting edge of new media technology, the Guardian today announces that it will become the first newspaper in the world to be published exclusively via Twitter, the sensationally popular social networking service that has transformed online communication.

The move, described as “epochal” by media commentators, will see all Guardian content tailored to fit the format of Twitter’s brief text messages, known as “tweets”, which are limited to 140 characters each. Boosted by the involvement of celebrity “twitterers”, such as Madonna, Britney Spears and Stephen Fry, Twitter’s profile has surged in recent months, attracting more than 5m users who send, read and reply to tweets via the web or their mobile phones.

As a Twitter-only publication, the Guardian will be able to harness the unprecedented newsgathering power of the service, demonstrated recently when a passenger on a plane that crashed outside Denver was able to send real-time updates on the story as it developed, as did those witnessing an emergency landing on New York’s Hudson River. It has also radically democratised news publishing, enabling anyone with an internet connection to tell the world when they are feeling sad, or thinking about having a cup of tea.

“[Celebrated Guardian editor] CP Scott would have warmly endorsed this – his well-known observation ‘Comment is free but facts are sacred’ is only 36 characters long,” a spokesman said in a tweet that was itself only 135 characters long.

A mammoth project is also under way to rewrite the whole of the newspaper’s archive, stretching back to 1821, in the form of tweets. Major stories already completed include “1832 Reform Act gives voting rights to one in five adult males yay!!!”; “OMG Hitler invades Poland, allies declare war see tinyurl.com/b5×6e for more”; and “JFK assassin8d @ Dallas, def. heard second gunshot from grassy knoll WTF?”

Sceptics have expressed concerns that 140 characters may be insufficient to capture the full breadth of meaningful human activity, but social media experts say the spread of Twitter encourages brevity, and that it ought to be possible to convey the gist of any message in a tweet.

For example, Martin Luther King’s legendary 1963 speech on the steps of the Lincoln memorial appears in the Guardian’s Twitterised archive as “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by”, eliminating the waffle and bluster of the original.

At a time of unprecedented challenge for all print media, many publications have rushed to embrace social networking technologies. Most now offer Twitter feeds of major breaking news headlines, while the Daily Mail recently pioneered an iPhone application providing users with a one-click facility for reporting suspicious behaviour by migrants or gays. “In the new media environment, readers want short and punchy coverage, while the interactive possibilities of Twitter promise to transform th,” the online media guru Jeff Jarvis said in a tweet yesterday, before reaching his 140-character limit, which includes spaces. According to subsequent reports, he is thinking about going to the theatre tonight, but it is raining .

A unique collaboration between The Guardian and Twitter will also see the launch of Gutter, an experimental service designed to filter noteworthy liberal opinion from the cacophony of Twitter updates. Gutter members will be able to use the service to comment on liberal blogs around the web via a new tool, specially developed with the blogging platform WordPress, entitled GutterPress.

Currently, 17.8% of all Twitter traffic in the United Kingdom consists of status updates from Stephen Fry, whose reliably jolly tone, whether trapped in a lift or eating a scrumptious tart, has won him thousands of fans. A further 11% is made up of his 363,000 followers replying “@stephenfry LOL!”, “@stephenfry EXACTLY the same thing happened to me”, and “@stephenfry Meanwhile, I am making myself an omelette! Delicious!”

According to unconfirmed rumours, Jim Buckmaster, the chief executive of Craigslist, will next month announce plans for a new system of telepathy-based social networking that is expected to render Twitter obsolete within weeks.

In case you haven’t seen the Apple Synched banner, check out the video below.

It’s nice creative – fit for form.

These are great examples of great online creative – it’s no surprise to see this work emanating from Lee’s shop.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves – these creative exceptions – whilst contextual – are just the beginning. A brand as powerful as Apple has perhaps a better chance than most brands to opt people in to the story. These formats should be the doorway to ongoing narrative cross platforms.

So much more can and will be done.

6% interaction rate sounds impressive but let’s be clear on what counts as an interaction. We too work with Clearspring – where the definition of “An interaction is counted each time a visitor mouses over a widget for more than 0.5 seconds.” On that count 6% aint that great – our average is more than double that.

Of course, man didn’t suddenly drop gills and leap out of the water and the same, perhaps, goes for advertising. I’m not sure that there is going to be a sudden ‘marketing big bang’ but there could very well be a few more erupting volcanoes along the rift valley and a lot more serious tremours along the tectonic plates of the advertising landscape. As we all know, these sorts of major events tend to spark a new generation of life, energy and creativity and this new branch should produce a few more green shoots.

Doc is absolutely right that a new age of two-way advertising is upon us, but I’m not sure that this is all going to happen immediately at the point of sale or be dictated by the wisdom of the crowds all of a sudden. The truth is that online stores are going to have to spring up around online communities and the members of those communities will be responsible for their appearance and growth. There will always be central repositories of content, but it is the end of the portal as we know it and subsequently the beginning of the end of push advertising. The way sales and marketing messaging is packaged and delivered is going to become much more organic.

Regardless of whether you are a media distributor, content owner or agency, profound change is upon us all.

Digital is perhaps finally coming of age. Direct Marketing/ROI driven communications and traditional brand advertising are no longer mutually exclusive. This will undoubtedly cause headaches for some and vast opportunities for others.  Whether you prosper or perish is up to you.

4 things to consider – seriously

MEDIA CENTRIC COMMUNICATIONS ARE DEAD. CROSS PLATFORM INTEGRATION IS THE WAY FORWARD

DISPARATE DATA IS DEAD. INTEGRATED CAMPAIGN DASHBOARDS ARE THE THE WAY FORWARD

PROPRIETARY MODELS ARE DEAD. OPEN COLLABORATION IS THE WAY FORWARD

IMPRESSION-BASED MEASUREMENT WILL DIE. ACTION-BASED MEASUREMENT IS THE WAY FORWARD

The below chart sums it up quite nicely…

Great in principle but really only possible with the right technology…speak to us!

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.