Listen Before Engaging Your Audience

An Early Job at Gateway Bears an Important Lesson for Today's Social Media Landscape

Posted by Craig Daitch on 05.07.08 @ 11:06 AM

Craig Daitch also writes the blog Thought Industry.

While putting myself through school I worked part time at a Gateway Country store in the suburbs of Detroit. Every day I'd come to work and watch as the full-time sales executives would meticulously go through the upgrades attributed to the new PCs that hit the showroom floor while describing them to their wide-eyed customers-to-be.

One former colleague of mine had a voice for radio, similar to Tay Zonday's, and you could imagine the impression he'd make as his bass-infused intonations echoed off the walls, evangelizing the power of bus speeds, RAM and hard-drive space. It was akin to a Las Vegas performance -- and you could imagine the number of "ooh's and ahh's" his passionate value propositions elicited from the future Gateway owners within shouting distance. Never mind that only one out of 20 customers knew what bus speed actually was.

Analog + Digital = Ideas + Technology

How a Seemingly Simple Presentation Turned Into an Analogy for Our Industry

Posted by Colleen DeCourcy on 05.06.08 @ 09:56 AM

Colleen DeCourcy

I was preparing to give a speech in Istanbul to our European leadership teams. I had decided I wanted to do something that would be both practical and philosophical. It was my first real presentation to the company about what our principles were going to be regarding digital: operating structures, strategy and craft. I started building the usual deck. It talked about the state of the marketplace and what clients were asking for. Then I figured I'd talk about media and thinking beyond the banner ad and the microsite. I had something about integrated teams on my list. And a reminder to define audience-centrism. But I just couldn't make myself put anything together. I couldn't make the deck. The information and I were at odds.

So I talked about it with a friend who said, "Why don't you do it on an old-fashioned overhead projector ... with acetates and markers." I liked that idea. I liked what it said about ideas being what mattered, about bridging the gap between analog and digital. It was also a great way to beat my impending deadline. It would be free-form. Easy.

When Everything Is Media, What Is Media Worth?

Why the Market Has Strugged With New Categories of Ad Inventory

Posted by Troy Young on 05.05.08 @ 11:41 AM

Troy Young

Note: Ian Shaffer and I are working some cosmic connection. I put a few words together for the blog last week and was surprised to see Ian working the same territory. Our sentiments seem to intersect nicely, albeit from different industry vantage points. My comments below speak to the explosion of impressions largely driven by social media, and the implications from a media value perspective.

The market has struggled to place value on social media as an ad vehicle, but with more than 30% of Internet traffic driven by social activities, a lot is at stake. This struggle is part of a larger media phenomenon that is raising significant new challenges for publishers and media professionals. Specifically, what is inventory worth, how do media channels compare and what creates premium value?

In the past 10 years, new categories of ad inventory have opened up as human activity has been digitized. I put them into five categories -- communications and self expression (social networks, e-mail, chat, photo and video sharing); commerce (shopping sites like Amazon, EBay); gaming (game platforms, virtual environments like Second Life, social gaming, etc.); reference (dictionary, health sites, wikis, etc.); service or utility (file sharing, even service environments like Comcast bill pay); and directory (search, maps). For the most part, these are new additions to traditional content or environmental media channels (TV, print, radio, outdoor). They've given marketers more options but created confusion around how to value and map the media landscape and achieve reach.

When Habits Change Faster Than Ad Models

Venture Capital and Big-Media Acquisitions Can't Bankroll Social Media Forever

Posted on 05.02.08 @ 09:32 AM

Ian Schafer also blogs at IanSchafer.com.

Technology is a funny thing. It enables humans to be capable of so much. It raises our potential to improve our lives and the lives of those around us.

But so much of technology is hidden from plain view because it doesn't make money. Financial gain is arguably the most important aspect of technological innovation, because without it, all but the most altruistic of reasons cease to exist.

Podcasting: Radio-Free You

Why Aren't More Brands Using This Emerging Tactic?

Posted by Mat Zucker on 04.29.08 @ 09:52 AM

Mat Zucker

I didn't know it at the time, but all the radio spots I did back in the '90s really set me up nice for the digital content era, especially for my favorite emerging media vehicle, podcasting.

In media, news and entertainment programming used it first, especially NPR (e.g., Driveway Moments) and later and more innovatively, HBO (e.g. Bill Maher's 2 Minute Rant). BusinessWeek does a great behind-the-scenes of each week's cover story and Jack and Suzy Welch have their career podcast, which is their regular column in audio format. And here at AdAge, there's a nearly daily 3-minute podcast of top stories.

For brands, though, podcasting has turned out to be especially effective for timely internal communications (e.g., speeches you missed in the office), customer service (e.g. Whirpool), business to business and some consumer areas, especially high-interest stuff. My experience has not only been blabbing about podcasting at conferences on both coasts but in producing some branded podcasts for Johnson & Johnson and most recently for CIT Group.

How Are We Going to Solve Communication Chaos?

Or 'I Am a Tag, Not a Number' Revisited

Posted by Craig Daitch on 04.24.08 @ 10:45 AM

Craig Daitch also writes the blog Thought Industry.

I've noticed with alarming frequency the number of conversations between friends and colleagues that start with "I was trying to get a hold of you yesterday..."

All of these conversations stem from one symptom: Communication Chaos.

The impact of Communication Chaos can be felt ubiquitously. From our personal relationships with family and friends, to the struggles marketing professionals feel when tasked with building relationships in this new world of ours (one with an ever-shifting target).

Communication Chaos affects the TV industry as much as it affects online. Seriously -- this goes far beyond a click, an impression or a GRP. If we can't crowd source our audience into one medium, how can we continue to market to them as if we can?

Brand Interactions Are the Future

But Are Interaction Designers Part of Your Agency?

Posted by David Armano on 04.22.08 @ 01:24 PM

David Armano

Ever wonder how on Earth Google went from a technology company to one of the world's most recognizable and successful brands? Was it the whimsical brightly colored logo? How about the ads? Wait, Google really doesn't advertise all that much -- do they?

Brand Google was built on a lot of different things. If brand 1.0 was Coke, built on a solid foundation of marketing, then brand 2.0 is more like Google, built on an ecosystem of experience and natural word of mouth referrals. But the one thing I want to call out is something I like to refer to as "micro-interactions."

Include Packets in a Social Media Strategy

These One-to-Few Tools Can Help Brands Reach Passionate, Networked Consumers

Posted by Mat Zucker on 04.18.08 @ 10:28 AM

Social media has become the new viral video, widget, microsite, etc. It's so broad and used so loosely, the term isn't that helpful in actually creating specific work. Brands are mostly watching and just starting to participate in a natural way.

What's a format for brands in social media?

Think about it in terms of the other kinds of formats. There are mass formats (TV, radio, print, out of home); one-to-some formats (targeted online media, podcasts); and of course, one-to-one (direct mail, email, SMS/MMS). But, in light of networked communities around which people are really passionate or intimate, what can brands create or do in terms of what is one-to-few?

Enter "packets."

Merging the Real World and the Internet

Second Life or Not, Virtual Worlds Are Here to Stay

Posted by Reuben Steiger on 04.17.08 @ 10:25 AM

Reuben Steiger

I'm sitting in the airport in Venice, writing my first blog post. I've spent the past few days attending the Venice Festival of Media, a conference attended largely by delegates from media buyers for the large networks as well as folks from internet heavyweights like Yahoo and Microsoft and traditional content companies like NBC Universal.

Much of the conversation focused on the "changing media landscape" -- everyone seems broadly aware that media markets are increasingly fragmented, digital is on the rise, social media is a critical piece of online activity and engagement trumps pure reach. Various networks recently announced that they will be mandating training to teach their television buyers how to better understand digital. Yet truth be told, my impression is that despite our industry's best intentions, the problems outnumber good old-fashioned measurable solutions.

In future posts, I'll dive deeper into solutions available today that solve many of these problems. For today, it probably makes more sense to introduce myself to you all and paint a picture of our business.

From 2004 to 2006 I worked at Linden Lab, the company that makes Second Life. While I was there, we grew our product from an obscure 3D virtual world into a place with hundreds of thousands of registered users. One of the things I focused on was bringing the first corporations in to conduct experimental projects -- in doing so I discovered an interesting market opportunity.

The 4-Year-Old and Her Grandma

Why 'Unlearning' Old Concepts Can Be Harder Than Learning New Ones

Posted by Craig Daitch on 04.16.08 @ 10:33 AM

Craig Daitch

My wife and I are the proud parents of a beautiful just-turned-4-year-old daughter. She shares a number of hand-me-down traits from our collective gene pools -- she's a little shy, personable when she's warmed up to you and absolutely loves tapping into her creativity. And though I adore her inherent curiosity, I'm even more amazed by her rapid capability to learn new behaviors.

So you could imagine for someone in my position, with an exhaustive playground of technology and gadgetry scattered throughout my house, what kind of impact that has on a child. We've always subscribed to a different philosophy though, even when she was still crawling: At no point would we discourage her from satisfying her desire to understand how things work and the purposes they serve. Yes, even at the shortened lifespan of my toys. Sure this has resulted in a few spills of juice on my MacBook and I still cringe when I hear my iPod hit the hardwood floor but I rebound quickly, knowing that it's all in the name of learning.