a multi-tasked stream of consciousness or perhaps just emails to myself
I hope this does not mean we are in for an advertorial-like wrapper on things… This would certainly change the percerption and potency of the message in things like the Subserviant Chicken and I, Robot..
A Web site meant to promote upcoming film drama “Godsend” is stirring controversy among people who oppose human cloning and want the site shut down because they think the site is real, the film’s makers say. [Yahoo! News]
Gotta like Qwest… I believe they were the first communications company to offer data only DSL and now they are dropping fees associated with VOIP. I respect their leadership and acknowledgment that there is more than traditional voice to sell.
Qwest Communications International Inc. (Q.N) said on Monday it would no longer levy connection fees on calls made to customers on its network from Internet phone services. [Yahoo! News]
Just kidding though it is raining today…
It seems the general advertising community is finally waking up to realize that aside from how ridiculous the ability to track return on investment is and that ratings are basically bogus, consumers are getting away from them as well thanks to technology. We’ll see what happens next as more money moves to iTV applications (eventually), interaction online advertising, and one would think… integrated direct marketing.
Spending just can’t happen without some real understanding of what happens next. You’ve got to attribute marketing dollars against what channels enable better and more profitable customers. I believe the mass brands actually have the greatest challenge to overcome in this newer world as they are not accustomed to limiting the scope of their message to people who might be more interested rather than anyone who might just happen to be watching.
Here’s an extract from Cnet on the latest from Forrester Research…
The premise of the report is that digital video recorders (DVRs) like TiVo that let TV viewers record programming and skip over commercials easily, will be in 30 million homes within the next five years, up from an estimated 3 million today. That has national advertisers considering their options, given the expectation that DVRs will undermine the potency of commercials. It also has them resigned to spending more on advertising in the future, only to reach fewer people.
At least three-fourths of the 55 national advertisers Forrester surveyed said they will cut spending on commercials as a result. Of those, 63 percent plan to reduce spending by 20 percent or more. A majority said they will first scale back national cable ads, followed by national network ads, local spots and local cable ads.
More than 90 percent of advertisers also want new measurements for advertising ratings and program viewing. They say the TV industry will need to report audience measurements outside classical benchmarks like “reach” (for number of people reached) and “frequency” (for how often they see an ad).
Advertisers called on TV programmers to work with device manufacturers and cable companies on DVR features that can help spur innovation and measurement in the marketplace, the report found. Three-fourths of advertisers also believe that they will have to begin creating content and programming to invigorate their brand campaigns.
In addition, advertisers plan to shift their money to other media. Nearly half of advertisers said they will transfer dollars to other traditional media, including magazines and radio, in which ads aren’t as easily skipped.
Three-fourths of advertisers surveyed said they will boost budgets for the Internet, including banner ads and rich-media spots. Fifty-three percent said they will invest in search engine marketing, which lets advertisers track and measure the effectiveness of their campaigns.
A majority of national advertisers expect other forms of TV ads to evolve and become more effective than the status quo, according to the report. Targeted TV advertising to specific households is on the horizon, too, drawing interest from at least half of those surveyed. DVRs are ultimately designed to make it easier to track people’s interests and demographics for targeted advertising. A handful of advertisers say they would pay a premium for those capabilities. [CNET News.com]
Steve Perlman created WebTV, sold it to Microsoft and then went on to create Moxi which merged with Digeo, now owned by Paul Allen. Up until today’s announcement that Comcast is going to test their set-top boxes only Charter (also owned by Paul Allen) were giving them a whirl. The box has capabilities well beyond what your average cable customer is used to, though the Scientific Atlanta 8000 is close on the DVR front. The main difference is that these boxes can serve as media centers and stream pictures and music through to a home theater in addition to their DVR capabilities. There’s even a wi-fi connection kit that allows a second TV to get in on the action so you can really have a slick set-up for your home.
I first picked up on this unit in news from the January 2001 CES, where it won a best in show… but has been heard of little since other than the deal with Charter.
Here’s some more on what we knew then….I’m hopeful this test is positive and that other carrier are attracted to the use of the box as well. They say it supports HD and can be connected to burners for archival though no word on how exactly the DRM might limit things…
Comcast to offer a Moxi set-top box :: U P R E Z :: Inside DTV
From what I understand Thaler has already shot the spot and used Omarosa in a recent AAAA presentation. This only confirms what I’ve known all along… Omarosa is un-hireable. She’s burnt too many bridges, lied and lied about lying. No one could possibly hire her and believe she was going to make a trust-worthy employee. Not exactly a great person to have represent your brand…
In what has to be some of the worst brand management in recent history, Clairol is toying with the idea of placing Omarosa Manigault-Stallworth, the deceitful “The Apprentice” contestant, in some of their Herbal Essence commercials. Surely, it’s a bid to capitalize on her 15 minutes of fame but one that could go sour as consumers threaten to boycott Clairol products if the company makes this brainless move. [Adrants]
NYT has an interesting article running about movie directors wanting to get in on game direction. They cite the Wachowski brothers, Ridley Scott, John Woo and Peter Jackson all pushing what were previous career (and earning) limits.
The Wachowski brothers are the only ones who have produced a successful movie with matching game, though Peter Jackson is working on a deal for King Kong now…
I’ve got an issue with this article from today’s MediaPost on a few levels…
Hespos says that XML Syndication currently faces a standardization problem. “There are plenty of readers but no killer apps.†Hespos notes that XML Syndication is still very much in the early adopter stage. “All I see is a lot of bickering in the early adopter community,†he says. “[XML Syndication] lives in blogging communities. If Microsoft were to take it up that would be a good thing, because it would speed up the adoption process.â€
Rick Bruner, president, Executive Summary Consulting, agrees. “It comes down to what Microsoft does with it. Longhorn is expected to come with an RSS reader. At that point, it could go mainstream–it could become a viable ad medium then,†Bruner says. [MediaDailyNews]
My issues here are that the writer claims (in the article, but not quoted here) that Atom will soon overtake RSS, which is interesting because based on the number of Atom feeds and the release level of the format it is still very early. Sure Google is the main backer, and apparently it’s easy to say they’re major so therefore it will win. This brings me to my next issue which is right in the quote above…
Both Hespos and Bruner claim that it is Microsoft who is holding adoption up based on their general lack of support. This is total bullshit!
The adoption rate, first is significant, both on the content generation side and also on the aggregation side. I’ll let you decide which number scale is more correct – Bruner in another article states according to research it is somewhere between 2.5 Million and 8.8 Million. It’s big. (There is no study on usage of these feeds… just that certain blog systems generate multiple formats.)
Microsoft does not have an aggregator and has not integrated RSS into the browser or the OS. but waiting for Microsoft and Longhorn will only delay what is already happening. People are finding ways to use RSS – though it needs to be made much easier to do so. Longhorn is not coming tomorrow or even this year… waiting on that will just have you listening to the hold music…
In thinking more about it, I think it’s going to take an AOL-like experience to make this take hold on a mass-scale – again assuming it should be used by all. Imagine the AOL UI with an RSS aggregator within. They could deliver their ads in a sane way, but enable a great number of people to read a huge amount of content within an efficient timetable. Maybe this hurts their ad model, as less time on is going to reduce the number of ad impressions, but perhaps they’ll just have to rethink the way things are served…
Dave Winer covers the software claims quite well (as you might expect) on his site.
No avoiding the heat I guess…. social networking continues to draw interest from the Majors…
Yahoo on Wednesday dropped hints of growing interest in social networking services for search, coming after announcements of efforts from rivals Google and Microsoft.
o’s vice president for search, said the company sees a future in which people can share their Web searches with friends.
“A lot of the Web is about sharing,” Cadogan said, speaking to an audience at Stanford Business School’s first annual technology conference.
He pointed to a fairly new feature from Yahoo that lets people in remote locations search simultaneously by using IM environments in Yahoo instant messenger. “This is just the beginning. A lot more will come from that,” said Cadogan, a former executive at Overture Services who joined Yahoo when it bought the commercial search pioneer. [News.com]
Reuters – Sales of Microsoft Corp.’s (MSFT.O) Xbox video game console have more than doubled since a price cut last week, one financial analyst said on Wednesday, confirming industry beliefs that lower prices would boost sales sharply in the short term. [Yahoo! News – Microsoft]
This chief of New York Times Digital once famously planned to spin off the online division and take it public. Didn’t happen. Now that his operation is turning a tidy profit, Martin Nisenholtz is back to making declarations. Wired magazine’s Josh McHugh investigates. [Wired News]
I wouldn’t need to work for Wired if I decided to live off AdSense clickthroughs on my own blog.
I haven’t seen anything that could create the scale necessary to engender a professional blogging class in any meaningful way.NYT Digital just announced a $20 million profit. AdSense seems to work for you.
We’re still mainly in the business of aggregating and sorting content that was created for other purposes. Plus, most of our advertisers don’t live and die by the clickthrough. Our brand advertising business has been growing 30 to 40 percent for the past two years. There’s a lot of room for innovation in brand awareness advertising.
Wi-Fi users will outnumber cellular data users by 2007, putting strong pressure on wireless operators to bundle both types of access, according to a report to be issued later this month by Pyramid Research.
“This trend should be a wake-up call to any carrier offering or planning to offer a cellular data service,” the research firm said in a statement released this week that summarizes the report. The trend puts T-Mobile in particularly good position because, despite criticism, it has invested heavily in Wi-Fi hotspots in the last two years, the report said.
“We believe that by bundling Wi-Fi and cellular, the carrier (T-Mobile) has created a service worth more than the sum of its parts,” the report concludes. The report notes T-Mobile’s claim that more than 30 percent of its hotspot users also subscribe to its cellular service.
“While we cannot say that Wi-Fi alone resulted in added cellular subscribers, the correlation between the two services is significant,” the report notes. “We believe that T-Mobile can justify its Wi-Fi investment purely through cellular customer acquisition and retention.”
By contrast, some operators are positioning their cellular data services as competing with Wi-Fi when they would do better to use Wi-Fi to gain and keep customers who may well use both types of access. The report counts as cellular data service EDGE, 1x services, EV-DO and UMTS. Currently, most subscribers of cellular data services us slower 1x service. [Mobile Pipeline]
I need to vent something briefly here on this topic…
While I was still employed at my former employer, the agency that manages ALL of Intel’s world-wide marketing efforts I proposed an idea VERY similar to this which was rejected by agency management and
decreed something that was not something Intel would want to manage. Well today is the day things change…
It’s clear that one issue holding back wider use of WiFi hotspots is the fact that the market is so fragmented. While there are plenty of free hotspots, one of the problems in getting people to sign up for paid hotspots is that the coverage is so sporadic and every place seems to be supported by a different provider. If you really want widespread coverage, you need accounts with a variety of different providers – which becomes ridiculously expensive. While the different hotspot builders and aggregators have been trying to negotiate roaming agreements, Intel has gotten fed up with the process and has routed around a number of their own partners to create RoamPoint, which is designed to be a single place for providers to create across the board roaming arrangements in Europe so that they don’t have to negotiate with each and every other provider.
They’re modeling it after how roaming agreements are set up with GSM networks. That sounds good in theory, but there are still some hurdles. First, they need to get the providers to agree to it. It’s noteworthy that the announcement of RoamPoint didn’t seem to come with any news of providers actually using the service. Also, they’ve just added yet another mouth to feed out of tiny hotspot fees. Now, for every paid hotspot you have a mix of some or all of the following: the retail location owner, the hotspot provider, the bandwidth provider, the aggregator and the roaming provider. It seems difficult to figure out where the profit is. [Techdirt Corporate Intelligence: Techdirt Wireless]
In essence my idea was this… As Intel was gearing up for the unwire campaign we would include a loyalty program with a card (though it certainly did not have to be tangible) that would enable people to receive a couple of key benefits.
First – gear would be discounted and this would be taken care of by the massive Intel Inside budget that already exists – it’s significantly larger than Intels direct marketing budget (not DM, but main intel branded efforts).
Second and here’s the why I am frustrated with today’s announcement. Intel could assume an instant leadership role by becoming a lead aggregator of hotspot connectivity. What you got instead was yet another hot spot locator.
Let’s be honest for a second and openly acknowledge that Intel is way late to wireless. Apple had it for
years within their systems and Intel had a major uphill climb to make to catch up. There were plenty of options for wi-fi well before Centrino (which embeds wifi alongside the processor) came out.
Granted launching a new line of business is fraught with risk – I get that – but Intel has money to use for marketing efforts to sell more PCs. They know how to ID machines on the web even – rememeber the
Pentium III web outfittter program? It blocked non-intel silicon from entering, not just Apple, but AMD as well. If the proper revenue sharing agreements were drawn up everyone would win. You would not need to know whether you had to have iPass, Boingo, T-Mobile, Cometa (another Intel funded company) or whatever. If you were part of the program you could connect anywhere there was a playing parter. If you were a wifi provider you’d want to play (at least in my mind) because a reduced revenue customer would still be a money you might not have if the person chose a competing service.
The main trick to pay-wireless is that it is far from universal. At least with cellular you can roam in many cases… in landline you can call a customer of another carrier without issue. Wireless connectivity should be simplified. If the goal as Intel’s marketing goes is to live the wireless life, it has to work where you are at the time you find a connection.
(I guess that wasn’t that brief)
Tiny Mac-related hosting site is giving away gig of free email. No idea how. Stefanie Olsen reports… [John Battelle’s Searchblog]
Spymac is trying to promote new Web hosting and auction services by giving away copious amounts of e-mail storage. With roughly 47,000 members, the former Apple Macintosh gossip Web site is small potatoes, compared with Google and other free–mail providers. But Spymac’s move to offer more storage is among the first signs that the market is moving toward parity and indicates the relatively low cost of such a move. [News.com]
This is a great post (quoted below) and links through to some significant thinking on RSS and the general adoption of the technology…
It’s something I’ve thought about as well, though this is clearly beyond the scope of my abilities to solve (I’m a marketing guy, not a developer…). I know for a fact that most of my friends and my family who stop by hear have no aggregator installed on their computers and are not currently using bloglines, myFeedster or something similar hosted elsewhere. Kinja, which launched last week, seeks to be the aggregator for people who nothing about RSS or aggregators but will have the same challenge getting adoption to occur.
On my site if you click either of my feed links (left side scroll down), you’ll get a pretty page of xml in the Mozilla family of browsers and Safari unfortunately downloads the file to your desktop. This is not a good thing… No one can easily understand the value without using the tool, but can’t quite grasp how to use the tool or even how to add feeds.
This needs a simple solution pushed through a transparent technology… assuming of course that we all agree aggregation is something for the masses…
Is RSS only for geeks? Should users be required to understand what ‘XML’ or ‘RSS’ mean, in order to take advantage of subscription and aggregation? Are subscription and aggregation useful for a broad range of users, or only for “power†users?
To me, the answers are obvious. I believe that subscription and aggregation are features that appeal to the mainstream, and the number of users who use RSS without having any clue about the underlying technologies could easily dwarf the number of %u201Cpower%u201D users. There are certainly people who feel differently – people who think that aggregator usage is low because most users don’t want or need the functionality. But I’m pretty sure that uptake is low because of poor user experience at this point. [Better Living Through Software]
It’s software not hardware and a new fix for DRM called Janus…. Like all things Microsoft, this is a wait and see in my book. The big boost here seems to be that subscription services will finally let users move tracks to portable players.
Long-delayed technology is close that could help fill portable music players with thousands of songs for as little as $10 a month. [CNET News.com]
Sure it costs nothing and offers 1 GB of storage, but Google’s newly announced Gmail service gives some privacy advocates the creeps. A program would scan missives for keywords and serve ads based on the content. [Wired News]
Update – 4:28PM
Cnet has similar coverage as well.
I’m not sure the targeted messaging bothers me so much within a free product. It gives Google great incentive to make an already good product (AdWords) better through a crazy amount of text to search (X users x up to a Gig of email). It is after-all a free product, so you would expect some ads. It should be a whole lot nicer than, the banners you get slammed with on Hotmail and Yahoo Mail. My guess is that the ads will be pretty relevant and probably get a pretty good click-through… have to start seeing how people report conversion numbers once the service is live.
Day 2… still no reply from my email for help on import. Not too good for a service seeking to be an aggregator for people who don’t know what RSS is… the other 90%. No auto-reply to let me know my message was received …
I am sure they are swamped with requests for info (the help page directs to you the main contact page with the main contact info). Might want to adjust that for help requests so you can filter these for more specific issues.
I’ve only messed with Kinja minimally at this point, importing my own blog – a bit of vanity perhaps – but it looks interesting. I doubt I am the audience, or someone who would make much use of the service – at least for now. Have to see how things develop.
Yahoo has launched a system to show the Web Rank popularity of pages viewed by those using its toolbar. It’s similar to the Google Toolbar’s long-standing PageRank meter – and brings with it some of the same potential problems. [Search Engine Watch]
Certainly exciting to be able to work on real clients, but paying for the privilege seems wrong to me. Why don’t they just pay less and call them interns or even entry level like everyone else.
Independent Wieden & Kennedy has launched a school, called 12, for aspiring advertising professionals. It’s a 13 month program in which student will do real work for real clients. While any good school should cost good money, and this one does at $13,000 a year, it seems strange that an ad agency would make someone pay to work on their clients. While clients worked on by 12 students will be charged a reduced rate, Wieden will still pull in that fee as well as the $13,000 per year for each student in the program. Sounds like Wieden is getting a good deal here. OK, I’ll admit there’s something in it for the students as well. [Adrants]
Researchers at Harvard and the University of North Carolina say music swapping isn’t to blame for falling music revenue, and might even help sell CDs. [CNET News.com]