Nice production… but what else can I do with it apart from watch a few clips? I would probably watch each one once unless they were really funny. Widgets need to allow the audience to get involved and mould the brand.

Check out the widget we have produced for Vodafone McLaren Mercedes featuring live telemetry from the cars and lots more. Users will be able to upload their own content to widget and vote on it very soon…

So far it has notched up nearly 20 million views at an interaction rate of 20%.

How did we do it? Contact us to find out.

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.

What is outlined here is very much inline with most of the discussion in this area:

“These new advertising units reflect the publishers’ desire to achieve four key objectives that will guide the evolution of online display advertising into its next phase:

1) Inspire creativity and high-quality advertising: Develop display units that will inspire a creative renaissance in high-quality advertising by providing a larger canvas for creativity, content and functionality.

2) Provide a greater share of voice for the advertiser: Increase the relative proportion of advertising space (in a single unit) to editorial content and, where possible, run fewer but more captivating ads on the page.

3) Introduce a measurement to capture impact: Develop a metric that emphasizes the impact creative advertising can have on Web viewers while preserving the Internet’s well-established ability to engender response.

4) Enhance interactivity to build user engagement with brands: Offer a broad range of interactivity built into units such as video players, lead capture and advertiser content that will be sharable and have permalinks to spotlight and encourage the best in creativity, while weaving the advertisements deeper into the social fabric of the Web.”

You got to love Point 2. I KNOW, LET’S JUST MAKE THE ADS BIGGER! I’m sure we can do a lot better than that!

The Open IMUâ„¢ format addresses all of the above – in an intelligent way.

In a meeting with a major publisher yesterday we were asked how we compare to our competition. In a similar vein to the above post, our response was to show how we DON’T compare. The majority of agencies in our chosen space are focused on ‘dressing up’ display media with the same old intention – create a click through. Rich Media sexed up!

The Open IMU™ format was built from the ground up with very different intentions at heart.  It has been designed to seamlessly integrate utility into display, thereby generating a captive audience that opts-in to repeat interaction. Whilst we can and do drive to site at the appropriate moment of truth, this is a fundamentally unique approach.

On the latest campaign for mydeco we are achieving the following results:

Across all platforms: online media, blogs, social networks and Internet start pages, the format is delivering the following. The interaction rate is more than 21%. The average CTR is more than 10%. The average number of clicks per view is more than 8. The average time spent is more than 1 minute.

Pull consumers in rather than pushing them away is the future…

Combining Online Display Media and Search is what got us started – a kernel of an idea that could be a big one. The only part missing in the MediaPost article is the intrinsic consumer utility. The Open IMU wraps it all up: Display + Utility + Search + Social distribution.

No doubt we will be seeing more in this vein!

Step 1
Either click the “Get and Share” button on the Clearspring panel or, in the event that there isn’t a panel, click the custom “Share” button on the widget to reveal the Clearspring menu.

Step 2
Click “All” followed by “Embed” then “Resize widget” and finally “Custom”. Type in the required width (Blogger sidebars are normally one of three widths of 220, 160 or 120 pixels) then click “OK”

Click the “Copy code” button (you do not have to highlight the text) and then click “Close”

Step 3
Click the “Get and Share” button again and then click “Blogger sidebar”.

Now click “Add to account” (if you haven’t already logged in you will be prompted to do so) and finally click “Close”

Step 4
Now you will find yourself in on a Blogger dashboard page named “Add page element”. Click “Edit content” and replace the code shown wirth the new code you copied in Step 2 and click “Add widget”. Click “Save” and that’s it!

Step 5
Click “View blog” to see you clever handywork! Well done! Except…

Step 6
Why not have a go with the widget we built recently called mydeco Design Box? It’s built on our new online advertising platform, Open SUITE and uses our new online advertising format called Open IMU, which converts into an application when you embed it delivering much deeper engagement.

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.