AAF: MySpace and YouTube, Yes; Blogs, Not Really Very Much
An AAF (American Advertising Federation ) survey of industry leaders on digital media trends indicates that advertising agencies are not confident that Fortune 500 companies quite appreciate the effectiveness of digital marketing. Sixty three percent of Fortune 500 companies according to the survey are, “generally behind the curve when it comes to online strategy.” However, the agencies executives themselves acknowledge that fifty-eight percent are “personally “struggling simply to manage existing online efforts, let alone stay ahead of the curve.”
Well, what a shame about that curve; agencies think clients are behind the digital curve but agencies admit they can’t stay ahead of it. While the agencies and the client in this surveys are roundingÂ� Dead Man’s Curve they might want to drive by Todd Copilevitz’ and see why they are Advertising Themselves to Death.. Another eye opener awaits as Todd notes that General Mills has told its agencies that they will now be compensated based upon the dreaded RESULTS.
Might be important to realize that the Future of Advertising is NOW: Its not about whether the advertisers or the advertising agencies “get it.” The consumer gets “it” and that is really all that matters. According to Yankelovich and Forrester, seventy percent (70%) of consumers say they like products such as TiVo that block advertising and ninety two percent (92%) of these users fast forward through advertising. For more data, check out the Word of Mouth Marketing (WOMMA) Research Blog and to experience the future in real time join me next week at the Word of Mouth Marketing (WOMBAT 2) Basic Training Conference.
OK, and how does the AAF regard blogs and “user generated content sites”? “Advertising executives find blogs a riskier, less effective advertising vehicle than user-generated content sites such as MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, etc. Sixty-two percent (62%) stated that “blogs are too risky to advertise with due to lack of predictability of the editorial content,” while only 53 percent agreed with the same statement about user-generated content. Despite these concerns, an overwhelming majority said advertisers “should exploit the viral marketing opportunities” of user-generated sites and, to a lesser degree, blogs.
Well Yankelovitch did report that 55% of consumers still enjoy advertising “itself’. Of course that reminds me of the oft quoted John Wannamaker comment about the 50% of add dollars that are wasted but he just didn’t know which half.
Tags: advertising, marketing, word of mouth marketing, WOMMA, WOM, digital advertising, digital media, YouTube, MySpace, blogs
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Word of MouthSpace
What space do gymnasts, cheerleaders, Fall Out Boy fans and gay guys share? http://www.myspace.com/stickitmovie.According to Reuters, Jessica Bendinger, the director of Stick It a movie the opened April 18th from Disney’s Touchstone Pictures devised a word of mouth marketing campaign through niche outlets and a MySpace page.
Disney promoted the movie in a two week flight of TV advertising using 10 and 15 second spots on syndicated shows such as "America’s Next Top Model." The actress, Vanessa Lengies, one of the stars in the movie asked Bendinger is she could set up a MySpace page for the movie. Vanessa set up the page but after several weeks Bendinger hired a freelancer to build traffic on the site.
Bendinger identified the target audience, gymnasts, Fall Out Boys fans, cheerleaders who were familiar with Bring it On (a cheerleader movie from 2000) and gay guys.They built the site to 6000 "friends". Then Disney took over the MySpace site and upgraded the design and features which added another 4000 "friends."
Bendinger definitely gets the effect of the 10,000 MySpace friends as she recognizes that 10,000 friends who have anywhere from 50-3,000 friends can sell a lot of tickets to a movie. But, Bendinger also had a few other buzz building tactics. She sought out a gymnastics writer to draft press releases for college magazines and newspapers highlighting all the NCAA gymnasts who are in the movie.
She also worked with Disney to package the movie’s trailer and the Missy Elliot music video to the 30,000 International Gymnast’s subscribers. Their subscribers gymnastic are gyms clubs…..there are 3000 clubs in the US and each club represents hundreds of gymnasts and gymnasts-to-be who are all high potential ticket buyers.
As Wired noted MySpace is a community site that converts electronic word of mouth into the hottest market strategy since MTV. Of course, it would have been interesting to have seen the impact of a blog strategy and to have seen what would have developed on the Stick It My Space site had Disney not taken it over.
And, yes, of course, you can see a clip of Stick It on YouTube. In fact there are several.
Tags: YouTube, MySpace, WOM, CGM, Marketing, Media, gymnastics, NCAA, Disney, Touchstone, MTV, Direct Mail
YouTube, NotYourTube, or YourBoobTube: This is What It Looks Like
YouTube users add 35,000 videos each day and viewers view 30 million videos each day according to Newsweek. Anyone can download a video, any video can be emailed; in minutes you can download a DIY video, a TV show, or a commercial or a combination of any or all of these.
Members can set up their own sites on YouTube, make comments, watch whenever and wherever they want and track the popularity of anything on the site. Videos can be tagged and each video has its very own identification number.
According to Media Post, "Its the interface, stupid" that makes YouTube everyone’s favorite tube. The speed of the download, courtesy of the intersection of technology and bandwith, is what drives YouTube. In this part of the model, customers develop and/or create the content, organize and rate it by virtue of the number of downloads while the publishers build platforms that are designed to share well with others. There are no annoying where and whens. And as Media Post points out, this is the Widsom of Crowds personified.
The Church of the Consumer says that, "YouTube has deftly designed itself around what appears to be one of the more significant contributors to the growth of an online product: Enabling a community of users to create content around content."
But, who owns the content? Businessweek said that YouTube could be another NBC or another Napster. Hmmm? The article states that "Hurley and Chen think they are working on the future of TV." Lots of the content on YouTube is user created. Think Bowiechick’s Breakup. But, lots of the content is user downloaded. Think SNL. (Yes, its not there anymore)
Hurley states in Businessweek that they want YouTube to be a destination that promotes content from "these guys, " meaning copyrighted content and has tools and technology to protect against copyright infringement.
Om Malik says, I believe that the growing popularity of You Tube (and other online video sites… about 95 in total as per Mary Hodder of Dabble) has less to do with amateur content, and more to do with copyright infringing content. Well, I guess it depends on which side of the copyright one sits and the definitions of ownership and control that one adopts.Or, is that even a relevant question anymore?
Robert Young writing as a guest on Om Malik’s Blog says "The thing that I find most compelling about the Internet as a whole is its power to turn well rooted, traditional business norms upside down on its head." Repeat after me, the Internet has changed everything….we have stepped through the looking glass .Individuals, collectively, control the content.
Consumers are producing content and consumers are distributing content. If you have a URL, you are a content distributor. As Young notes, "if NBC.com puts up a video on their site and I point to the URL in a blog entry, I have exercised my influence over the distribution of that content. And if my blog post subsequently starts a huge viral redistribution of that URL to millions of other people, my control and influence over the distribution of that NBC video will have been at the expense of all other distribution outlets that are under the control of NBC.
He nails it when he writes, " As the worlds of media and technology collide with a force that can split an atom, such cognitive dissonance is a natural by-product of the fact that more and more content (and code) is being produced by the people themselves. At the same time, with the increasing digitization of media, the definition of “distribution†is also changing from channels previously rooted in the physical world to one where people themselves become the new distribution channels via tightly and loosely-coupled social networks connected together by the universal language of IP and bits."
The SNL clip on YouTube drove traffic to YouTube but also did much to generate a renewal of interest in Saturday Night Live.SNL said, Our goal on this is that obviously we want to find a balance between supporting the fan base that’s out there for these shows but also protect a significant amount of copyrighted material."
But wait, there is another issue.You Tube as the BoobTube. Lance Ulanoff coins the term iVideoism, and describes an addictive type state that viewers suffer from; the ivideoits will become alienated from others as well as from reality, which he declares a social problem. Did he possibily miss the reliance on the social network that drives the video sharing?
From the intersection of anthropology and economics, Glen McCracken disagrees and says that it is the same argument that was applied to TV in the 1950’s. Early TV he says had only a few channels, only a few brands to advertise and the advertising did not require deep thought. The process was that content was uniform, this induced conformity and social alienation would soon follow.
He says, "No, the reason YouTube is interesting is that it offers a fountain of invention from many thousands of people, pursuing a vast number of, some of them, deeply strange and cryptic projects. YouTube is a mad house of inventiveness."
Ulanoff disagrees, and essentially says that the content on YouTube is stupid and watching it will make us stupid, ala TV as the Boob Tube. He writes, "Those sorry folks have no patience for the humor, sometimes subtle, of viral video or the "gee, wasn’t that amazing" response elicited by videos like the one of the autistic kid scoring 20 points in 4 minutes in his high-school basketball game. They just want skin and lots of it."
So, is YouTube the BoobTube or a mad house of inventiveness? Are the videos user generated content or copyright infringement content? It’s all of the above. More importantly, I am not sure that it matters. The value of the community to the individuals may not be in the content, anyway but in the social network that develops over time. Further, as Jeff Jarvis notes, its all about filtering and aggregation, "
"Value lies at the aggregation point." - I forget who said it, but it rings in my head daily. Newspapers’ value lies in aggregating readers for advertisers (not in some high-horsed journalistic elite). Google’s value lies in aggregating viewers. Conferences aggregate audiences. MySpace aggregates teens. Facebook aggregates college students. O’Reilly aggregates developers. Aggregation is where the value lies."
Filtering: Pure "news" (items being pulled off the AP wire) are along the same lines as stock prices, they’re commodities. But filtering, perspective, a trusted voice — that brings tremendous value. And people flock to the filters that appeal to them."
In other words, YouTube is a community of aggregated users and content creators providing a filtered perspective to other creators and users.
So, to repeat the quote from the This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics," the reason YouTube is interesting is that it offers a fountain of invention from many thousands of people, pursuing a vast number of, some of them, deeply strange and cryptic projects. YouTube is a mad house of inventiveness…this is what it looks like. This is who we are."
And what is YouTube for marketers and advertisers? Well, as USA Today, the New York Times, and Business Week all note, advertisers are seeding YouTube with commercial clips. According to USA Today, Nike’s Ronaldinho clip was downloaded over 3 million times. Cost to Nike? The cost of the digital video. The value ? Priceless.
Other uses can be seen at Brand Autopsy. And then of course, YouTube is a virtual goldmine for market research and trend spotting.
Tags: YouTube, Video, User Generated Content, Media, Advertising, Copyright Infringement, Social Media, Social Networks, TV, Intermediation
Wombat Podcast #10: Sean Glass and Chris LaConte
Sean Glass and Chris LaConte of Higher One talk about how they have used Word-of-Mouth to build their on campus financial services business on a podcast at the Wombat Blog .It is fascinating!
Sean and Chris talk about how when they started the business their first encounter with the influence of word-of-mouth was through negative word-of-mouth generated through misinformation about their on-line bill pay product. They astutely realized the importance of getting the right message to the right people by joining the conversation.
They began working with students to identify the physical locations, the venues, on campus where the conversations were happening and began providing students with the tools to facilitate the spread of information about their products. They gave students copy and content that they could then personalize and pass along to their friends and classmates. They identified students who believed in their products and were willing to talk about them and made them Agents.
The Agents were required to provide written reports of their activities and to encourage students to submit high quality reports, they were given points based upon the quality of their reports. The reports provided Higher One with immediate feedback, both negative and positive, that was then used to make changes, improvements, or otherwise build their business. The Agents functioned as the marketing department as well as the market research department. Impressive!
Sean and Chris say that word-of -mouth can be an entrepreneurs best friend….it is important to give early adopters the tools to amplify word of mouth…this includes finding the venue, providing information to share, and motivating the evangelists. Advertising they said can build awareness and create demand…word-of-mouth drives the decision to buy.
I mentioned Sean in a post in November about Word-of-Mouth Marketing on college campuses and he emailed to thank me and to tell me that he had started blogging. I am sure he will have a lot to say!
Besides Higher One, which is projecting sales of over $18 million in 2006, the 26 year old has among many other accomplishments, co founded the Yale Entrepreneurial Society a non-profit that promotes entrepreneurship in the greater Yale community and ThreadKill.com which I suggest you read his explanation for, and is an investor in Axon Labs, a sleep research labortory that is developing products to enable peak performance based upon research in neuroscience. The Axon web site links to an American Medical Association study that officially declares waking up the worst part of the day. Just visit our house any school day morning to confirm that.
Technorati Tags: WOMMA, advertising, blogging, WOMBAT Blog. word-of-mouth, buzz marketing, college marketing
Ready, Xfire, AIM: Axed again!l
There is a lot being written about the increasing use of Instant Messaging especially about teenagers. CNET reports the following from an AOL commissioned poll: "Nearly 66 percent of 13- to 21-year-olds say they send more IMs than e-mails, compared with 49 percent last year…
Overall, 38 percent of users say they send as many or more IMs than e-mails…One-fourth of users would like to see entertainment content within instant messages."
In a separate article about business use of Instant Messaging CNET reports, "It’s official: Instant messaging is the new e-mail for the world’s businesses." They estimate that there are "1 billion IMs sent every day between 28 million enterprise users." Businessweek deemed email "So Five Minutes Ago" and attributed the trend to "the anthropological shift
occurring among tomorrow’s captains of industry, the text-messaging
Netgens (16-to-24-year-olds), for whom e-mail is so "ovr," "dn," "w/e
(over, done, whatever)." Trendwatching elaborates on virtual anthropology in their December issue.
Of course, where there is a consumer behavior as attractive as this one, advertisers are right there. iMEDIA reports "Major advertisers and their agencies are now leveraging the medium of instant messaging as a mainstream interactive vehicle." IMedia says that "major advertisers including Volvo, Daimler Chrysler, Warner Brothers,
United Paramount Network, NBC Universal, Procter & Gamble, Nike, Tysons Chicken,and ING Direct participate eagerly in IM-related ad campaigns."
MIT Advertising Lab reported in November that AOL was using 2 bots, Moviefone and Shopping Buddy in its instant messaging service. The reception among users has been mixed. In December, they report that MAKE magazine is delivering content via instant message.
"The MAKEbot is a AIM/iChat buddy you add to your buddy list. When you
type latest, he will give you the latest news from Makezine.com. You
can type "subscribe 1" and he’ll deliver the latest news each hour. If
you type "photos" you’ll get the latest photos from the MAKE photo
pool, type "bookmarks" you’ll get our latest bookmarks, type
"Instructables" you’ll get the latest how-to projects. Lastly - if you
type keywords like psp, welding, ipod or whatever he’ll search the MAKE
site, the pages from MAKE and give you a link from our search engine to
help you find what you’re looking for.
MAKE is self described "as a hybrid magazine/book (known as a mook in Japan). MAKE comes
from O’Reilly, the Publisher of Record for geeks and tech enthusiasts
everywhere." You can read more about it on the Make Blog.
We can only assume that this is just the beginning. iMEDIA reports a related trend: The relationship between gamers, Instant Messaging, and advertising content delivery. On-line games users have become their own demographic target. There are over 70 million gamers in the US and they are male and between the ages of 14-35. They are affluent, well educated and love to communicate via IM, blogs, text messages, websites and voice chat.
Remember the anthropological shift I just mentioned? Well, the hardcore gamer is the influencer according to iMedia: "Trends,whether gaming related, fashion, soft drink, cars, music or
film, are determined by the hardest of the hardcore gamers who then
influence less avid gamers"….spreading the word through Instant Messaging while playing games.
Apparently, IMs cause problems with other PC software causing computers to crash. This doesn’t make for a very nice gaming experience. Consequently online game developers solved this problem by allowing for IMs within the game.
One such company, Xfire, "has provided other community tools to improve the ease of
gaming and the spread of community information. Xfire lets gamers see
what games their friends are playing, do IM from within a game to
friends outside the game, do voice chat while in-game, download files
over a fast peer-to-peer system, and more. This has led to Xfire
becoming the fastest growing online gaming community in the world with
over 2.5 million registered users, each user running Xfire an average
of 85 hours per month."
OK, so I had never heard of Xfire and neither had my kids who fit right into the demos. That was the good news. The bad news for parents is that Xfire tracks users. The good news for marketers is that Xfire can implement very targeted behavioral marketing campaigns. Now, while at their site, I noticed a little round burst that said, "Its Free No Spyware". So, if they are tracking all this data, isn’t this spyware??
OK, so I have written before about Axe Deodorant before in terms of their targeting of adolescent boys with the premise that if they use Axe they will get girls. I have also admitted that along with disapproving of the message, I have purchased the product for my son on the premise that the end, a clean boy, justifies the means, buying Axe. In late 2005, Axe introduced a new scent, Unlimited, as in, unlimited ways to pick up girls, and used two characters, Evan and Gareth and sent them off on a blog adventure. They also started appearing on Xfire.
In viral marketing mode they started out with downloads of Evan and Garth movies without mentioning the "A" word. This apparently started the Xfire IM buzz going. Later in the campaign paid placements on Xfire along with Videos with Axe products. According to the iMedia article written by Mike Cassidy, CEO of Xfire,
The results of the campaign were spectacular:
- Fifteen of the 34 top downloaded files ever on Xfire were Evan & Garreth movies with a total of 530,747 movies downloaded.
- There was a 99.4 percent increase in awareness of who Evan &
Garreth were with an astounding 222.5 percent increase in awareness of
which products were really being featured. - Over half (51.7 percent) of the Xfire user base stated their intention to buy Axe products at the end of the campaign
- And 38.7 percent stated they thought "Axe would help get the girl"
Stowe Boyd writes about a Forrester Research Study
that affirms the importance of game advertising. The study says that
there are two kinds of game advertising vehicles: in-game advertising
which is like product placement in TV programs and movies and
advergaming which is an on-line game that is promtotion itself. The AXE effort used both methods.
So, from a marketing perspective, the importance of IMs and in-game marketing cannot be overlooked. Also from a marketing perspective, Axe has been a successful word-of-mouth marketing story. I can even attest to that as a parent having heard my own son give a guest lecture to his friends in the back seat of my car about why he preferred Axe to Gillette’s Tag.
However, from a parent’s perspective I remain concerned about this kind of "word of mouth" campaign targeted at adolescent boys with a message that is blatantly disrespectful and exploitive to women. I am also not comfortable with my kids visiting a gaming site that is mining data under the camouflage of a "no spyware" burst. See Google 2084.
Technorati Tags:
IM, Instant Messaging, AXE, Xfire, Viral Marketing, Word of Mouth Marketing Del.icio.us Tags:
IMs, Instant Messaging, on-line gaming, word-of-mouth marketing
Beta Marketing
The WSJ has an article today on technology companies use of beta tests as marketing tools. This is not really new news. TechNewsWorld titled an article "Software Firms Use Beta Tests to Build Buzz" several months ago and coined the term "beta mania" to describe the phenomenon.
What I think is noteworthy about the widespread use of beta introductions are two things. The Wall Street Journal article highlighted one, the public acceptance of a version of a product that by definition of the word, Beta, implies that it is unstable. It says, "Few people would fly on an airline that advertised its planes had
untested engines, or swallow a pill from a drug company that admitted
the side effects were unknown. Yet when it comes to software, it seems
consumers are much more adventurous."
The WSJ then quotes Peter Sealey, a marketing professor, and formerly CMO of Coca Cola during the CAA days who aptly notes "I can’t come up with anything else in the entire marketing world where
marketers knowingly introduce a flawed or inadequate product [and] it
helps grow your user base."
When you think about this, it is amazing. Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo are the big Beta players but there are lots of baby Betas….the WSJ mentioned Esty.com; I am currently using TailRank, Measure Map, and Firefox 1.5 to name a few. Now I wouldn’t fly in a Beta plane or drive a Beta car so why do I use Beta software. It must satisfy some inner need to try something new, try something cool…give input into design without actually designing; there is no cost so the value outweighs the risk. So, what’s a little instability….we can have that from the software that we pay for and depend upon!
The other aspect of Beta marketing that I think is noteworthy is the invitation list…..Google has really fine tuned this with Gmail! What better way to create buzz than to be exclusive. And not only did the invitees get to be regarded as cool enough to get an invitation from Google for a Gmail account, they got to designate others cool enough to achieve Uber Geek status as they pass on invitations to others.
Technorati Tags: Google, Beta_tests, Measure_Map, TailRank, Buzz_Marketing
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