Archive for the 'Technology' Category

Here’s the idea. When you go to hulu.com, the website set up by NBC Universal and Newscorp to compete with YouTube, to watch a video clip you can choose what ad you want to watch with it. “You want a sports coupe ad with that clip from the Office, sir? Or perhaps you’re more in the market for a SUV? Let me get that for you straight away.” Hmm.

“It’s choose-your-own-adventure advertising,” enthuses Jean-Paul Colaco, Hulu’s ad guy quoted in today’s Financial Times. Yeah, JP, it’s a veritable adventure. One bad car ad over another, that’s real consumer control. He recognizes that online vid viewers (OVVs) get bugged by having to watch the same old “pre-roll” ad at the for the first 15 seconds of the video and hence the solution - a nod towards relevant content (rather than simply, you must be a young adult if you’re watching this stuff so we’ll plop an ad for a product targetd to you lot before the real entertainment begins).

But it is just a nod. And is a very blunt way of targeting. The viewers won’t, for instance, be able to forgo watching the an ad altogether; they can just choose from a very limited selection which one to play.

If they want to see the damned clip, they have to just grin and bear watching the godawful ad too! Got it?

YouTube’s approach, announced a couple of months ago, is a little different. There will be overlay ads on the bottom quarter of the video screen which viewers can expand to fill the whole screen or, thankfully, block out altogether.

This is better than forcing people to watch the ads, but is still a far from perfect solution; one that uses the medium as the interactive experience it should be. I always loved “Pop-Up Video” on VH1 - you know, the music video show in which trivial facts about the videos popped up as they played - and now dream that online video could do the same thing. For online video the pop-ups wouldn’t come up automatically - as, on a screen that small they would obscure the whole picture and only doesn’t irritate on much repeated content, such as music videos you’ve seen a hundred times before - but would pop up if you, the viewer, decided you wanted to know more: more about the character, the production or maybe even the stuff (aka “the products”) shown. Rolling the mouse over the cool car in the clip could give you a price and some specs, perhaps mention a promotion or invite you to click for a test drive.

Thing is, that technology is available now (see the demos on videoclix.com), it’s just that using it would take too much effort for advertisers to individualize the pop-ups to each different video. They like a one-size-fits all approach, treating the audience as one homogenous demographic, rather than recognizing that in this new Punk world marketers need to customize their messages.

Oh well, I’ll keep dreaming, and probably avoid altogether watching the online videos with pre-roll ads.

The Financial Times reported yesterday that Apple is considering launching an “all you can eat” iTunes service that would allow customers to get unlimited access to the iTunes library in exchange for their paying a premium for iPods and iPhones. This mirrors Nokia’s “comes with music” offer the Finnish company announced last December in which folks will be able to get all of Universal Music library of music by paying a premium on top of the price of a Nokia phone. The FT reported that Apple might also be examining a subscription service in which iPhone customers pay a monthly charge as part of their phone bill to get unlimited access to iTunes tunes.

What’s interesting about this is that Apple is proving itself once again to be adept at shifting and innovating as the market moves. Rather than simply sticking to the business model that has made them the most successful seller of music downloads (by far), the black turtle-necked one has recognized that being the biggest in ANYTHING is no guarantee of future success. Consumers don’t like being taken for granted and if something new and shiny comes along, such as unlimited music, they might easily be tempted to dump their iPods or iPhones in favor of a cool new Nokia phone that gives it to them. And data shows that consumers would be willing to pay a $100 premium for as device to get unlimited music over its lifetime, or $7-8 a month in extra subscription charges.

To be a Punk Marketer you have to put yourself in the shoes of the consumer (however smelly they might be) and imagine what they want and need. As a starting point, assume there is no brand loyalty, even for a brand as “cool” and iconic as Apple, and that consumers are fickle and will change allegiance as fast as it takes to say, “but this ones cheaper!” Research is useful for that, but so is intuition and common sense, and Jobs is a master at understanding what will appeal to consumers emotionally without having to see proof of it. And the other thing that Apple consistently does is to set its own standards, not be governed by those of the industry. Each product they come out with doesn’t just improve on the competition, it redefines the market. Sure, the iPhone has its problems (most of of them because AT&T’s network isn’t good enough), but it has set the standard for all future mobile devices leaving all but rival Nokia, with its new N-95 phone, scrambling in the dust.

It was announced today that Crispin Porter + Bogusky won the advertising account for Microsoft’s consumer products, a piece of business with billings in excess of $300million. That is some feat and I want to be the first (alright, the 589th) to congratluate my old colleagues at the agency. They’ve come a long way since I first met them in 1997 when they were less then 100 people occupying two floors in an office tower in Coconut Grove, Florida. Not many people, even in the insular ad industry, knew of them depite the fact they’d been doing great work for a few years and even when they launched the brand Truth - still one of the best campaigns for anything anywhere - the next year they were regarded by most as a bunch of oddballs who had no place working on big mainstream brands.

Well today oddball came of age. You don’t get much more mainstream than good old Microsoft, the company that people love to hate for its size, dull-looking products and geeky persona. The big MS must have realized that to transform its image, its only hope was to completely rethink its brand and, seeing what CP+B did for companies like Burger King, they became pretty much the only choice. The runner-up for the account was Fallon, a great agency, but one that has hardly done much to add that priceless ‘cool factor’ to its clients’ brands in the last few years. What they did for BMW by creating Hollywood-quality films for the web was amazing for its bravery but, hey, that was 8 years ago now.

There are few agencies that compete with CP+B. It has almost single-handedly transformed the way advertising is defined, from a format driven discipline to something much broader and organic. The way Alex Bogusky and his creative lieutenants think about markting problems is just so markedly different from the way it works in other agencies, it just doesn’t bear comparison. Smaller agencies run by big thinking renegades have a chance to learn from CP+B and create truly media neutral, holistic campaigns, but I just don’t know how the big agencies, so used to working in the old way where media determines creative (and TV is always king), have a chance. Luckily for them there are still clients who put a premium on service above creative, and global network above big thinking, but with accounts like Microsoft handing the keys over to agencies like CP+B, I wonder for how long.

Okay Punk Marketing Legion, since my last post was so looooooong, I’m going to keep this one short. I wanted to share something I came across while trolling the InterWhatever. Cooked up by German agency Jung von Matt/next, it’s somewhere between a bill board, a graffiti mural, and a really GINORMOUS video game:

Hamburg-based funny-named agency Jung von Matt/next unveiled a graffiti wall with embedded interactive qualities. (So much better than those silly walls that shout out to you in the U.S.)

Billed Nextwall, the 30m-long unit features embedded Semacodes. Snapping a pic of a Semacode with a cameraphone unlocks hidden videos, mobile wallpaper and social features, like the ability to write to friends on the wall’s “digital pinboard.”

Passersby can also download an info guide on the wall via Bluetooth. Anyone that snaps a photo of one of the wall’s characters can use it as a coupon in nearby shops.

After reading this, I got so excited (ooh!) about multitudinous possibilities for mobile marketing.

Can you imagine a scavenger hunt-type game played across a whole city (or a country) with these things?!

Graffiti laden or not, the newest interactive billboards offer wild ideas that will keep intrepid Punk marketers awake at nights. Go get ‘em.

On Jan. 4, 2008, in his article “Death of DRM Could Weaken iTunes, Boost iPod” Dave Kravetz of Wired wrote:

“The report that Sony BMG is moving to DRM-free downloads represents the music industry’s white-flag concession that its copyright-protection scheme created a powerhouse in Apple’s iTunes Store while failing to combat piracy.” Wot!

Happily, we couldn’t agree more. Punks hate DRM, if not out of principle then simply how poorly attempts at “digital rights management” have been executed.

But besides just failing to combat piracy, DRM has also been a total fiasco for record companies in terms of PR devaluation.

Keeping with the Sony BMG example, a few of you may recall that not far down the memory hole, in October 2005, there was quite a row over the “rootkit” shenanigans perpetrated by the naughty and positively Orwellian Sony.

Installing hidden software on customers’ computers that open up security holes on your system, slow down your computer, or cause it to crash??

Talk about bad PR karma.

And the back lash was tremendous in the wake of Mark Russinovich’s (appropriately dated) October 31, 2005 blog post “Sony, Rootkits and Digital Rights Management Gone Too Far” In the end, citizen journo Russinovich showed Sony his own version of “digital rights management” and gave them a digi-journali-tal smackdown.

And while many of us may be cheering the DRM death knell being sounded, it remains to be seen if Sony-like companies have learned from their mistakes. There’s already talk of the next stage in the evolution of this intellectual property trend at Wired—a/k/a watermarking.

And as we bid a not-so-fond farewell to DRM, we close with a parting question for all the: “Was all the bad press really worth it?”

Answer to be seen.