V. Important iPhone update

Just had a bite to eat with someone more in the know than self. Said person is proud owner of iPhone so definitely contender for my unrelenting iPhone envy. He was kind enough to share his views on all matters iPhone related (that I asked about anyway).

I'm not saying any of these facts will be news to you, but they were to me so just in case I am will share.

• Currently 7000 people on the Optus Network, in Australia have gone to the trouble of importing an iPhone, decoding it (having broken I don't know how many laws!). I imagine that extending this figure out across major Telc'os we'd be talking at minimum 20,000 devices in the country. And I thought I was an early adopter!
• It is definitely a matter of months until they go on sale in Australia
  
• After learning from o/s mistakes, Apple will be going to market here across multiple providers (woopee, I am an Optus customer and I am quietly confident I'll be aok)
• The current model does not support email (ie Blackberry). Not such good news, may have to be laggard and wait :(

The bigger story of course is the pressure delivery will put on the market to drop packet data costs. With any luck, as a result the mobile web is about to take off in a big way. And I think we've all agreed in the past that the opportunities available on this platform are going to be quite revolutionary. I am excited!

Apparent blogging slackness

Sorry! After the week out my workload has gotten the better of me. Hence part 2 from Spikes has been a long time coming. And to be honest the content is not as top of mind as it was.

But I will try.

Note to all. The quality of the Media entries was poor. A travesty that we didn't enter some of own quality work! There were no Gold Spikes awarded in the media category, only silver. In the digital category, 7 Silvers and 1 gold so a better showing.

Once again the Creative vs Media debate arose. Bored of it, so bored of it. 2 sessions were dominated by this agenda on day 3. Enough already!

Barry Cupples from Omnicon (I know a competitor) was the presenter of the day. His topic was content, a moving feast. An inspiring session on the content topic. One notion I thought of merit was briefing Hollywood Writers to come up with integrated branded content then funding the whole shebang via merchandising. Big picture but why not!

The final session I wanted to mention was titled 'An Inconvenient Truth'. The topic was sustainability. Whilst the intent was to encourage us to leverage this issue within client marketing efforts, there was another theme coming though. That being, if we don't do enough within our own office to accomplish change how can we champion this with our clients? Watch out Starcom, I may just make this a mission for us all. Anyone passionate enough to help?

Oh and more from from Gayle of Microsoft. Her 7 ways to Rock online;

- Keep it short but very sweet (the 3 min max)
- Pick topics that can work across multiple markets
- Get creative with funding
- Get creative with time sensitive targeting - time of day as well as appropriate length of content
- Know that good values is good business - give back, social relevance and causal marketing trends are huge - but no one is landing digitally so far
- Don't walk away too soon, you may be just around the corner from the tipping point
- Trust in the numbers

Spikes 08 learnings

Currently I am attending the Spikes Award and Conference, which Microsoft have sponsored and added digital specific sections to.

Thought I'd share some of the more interesting 'stuff'...

Stuff take 1

South Korea is currently building a completely new city from a connectivity / infrastructure perspective, ground up, it's name is New Songdo City. It will be interesting to see this come to life as Microsoft having won the tender are incorporating technology into every fibre of the city. So think the Jetsons and you will be on the right track.

What this means for advertising in Songdo is a true glimpse at the future. They will not permit any advertising that doesn't serve a purpose. Every advertisement will be governed to only appear in context and be interactive.

We were shown a new product in development called Microsoft Surface which will be part of every home. See if you can find a demo online, it's amazing. It looks like a table and is your portal to 'your world'. Walk in and put your phone on it and it will instantly sync. You can move data, photos, videos, music etc at the shake of your hand. Every element within the screen is interactive and easily available to move across every device.

Moving on from Songdo, stuff take 2.

A recent worldwide study into 14-24 y/o found that this demo on average have 53 friends. That's a lot of friends right?! When probed further their friends fall in average as follows:

- 6 close friends

- 27 friends but not considered close friends

- 20 friends whom have met online but never in person

My immediate reaction was sure, but this would be driven up by some Asian countries who are more wedded to the net than most. Apparently not. Whilst there are skews, Australia falls almost bang on average! The two countries with extremely high online only friends were China and Brazil with 40+.

Final stuff

The final item to share today is regarding branded entertainment. Gayle Troberman, the Global Microsoft CEO of this pillar was an outstanding presenter, full of passion and energy for her topic. They have accomplished some amazing work around the world, I was left with a determination to get something happening in this arena.

One example she shared was for a brand targeting mums. Their approach was to solicit real stories about kids from mums and make them into video segments. She called this user inspired content. The reason being they took the real stories and hired Hollywood actresses, and used high production facilities to shoot. The results? This online TV series called 'The Motherhood' has been streamed over 50 million times. Brand awareness, consideration and sales are all ahead of forecast.

A final thought was regarding the length of video content a consumer is likely to 'snack' on. They have found that the absolute max is 3 minutes. What is more interesting is that if you are able to pack compelling content into say 45 seconds you are in a position where the user is still on the edge of their seat....in this instance, a perfect time to populate the screen with eg search links to every possible direction relevant to the clip. In doing so, they are converting 10% through to search results.

It's now 9am and I've another full day of sessions ahead so will report more later.

Yvette

Innovative billboards for Google Video in Berlin

When Google launched their German version of Google Video they decided to do a bit of advertising for the product. Google don't usually advertise much as they have tremendous word-of-mouth and brand recall. However this didn't stop them from using a very innovative (in my mind) billboard campaign.

The billboards were mostly clear, with a little strip on the top and bottom of the frame to make it look like watching a video in Google Video. In the search term box were some words describing the scene passersby would see through it.

Check our the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Um-WL7FRANM

The most influential writing on media, technology and the internet

I just came across this list of the most influential Media Writing of 2007....Written by John Bracken leveraging his wide professional Network it will certainly give you some food for thought.

Following is the key paragraph followed by a link to the full article.

When I asked this question last year, the two most cited works were Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks and Jack Goldsmith’s and Tim Wu’s Who Controls the Internet. This year, three pieces particularly stood out in people’s minds: The Wealth of Networks, once again; Wu, again, this time for his Wireless Carterphone paper, and Benkler’s Berkman Center colleague David Weinberger for Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder.



http://bracken.wordpress.com/2007/12/20/the-most-influential-media-writing-of-2007/

Morgan and Nielsen go head to head

The battle is heating up between the major research players in Aussie media research re online consumption.


2 weeks ago we saw the release of research from Nielsen claiming that we Australians spend more time on the web than watching TV (see post dated 19th March).


Roy Morgan have now gone out refuting this claim (http://www.roymorgan.com/news/internet-releases/2008/734/). Their single source research reports that whilst consumers spend 21.8 hours watching TV weekly, they spend just 9.5 hours on the internet.

I'm not taking sides, but 21.8 hours in front of the box is truly sad! Get a life people.

Our friendly search guru Rob Marston stirred the pot and asked Nielsen for their comments on the matter and got this back:

It is a good laugh – industry posturing and generally poor form on their part. Basically Roy Morgan’s point about methodology was incorrect & Ad-News should have checked it first – the results we put forward are based on internet and telephone interviews. We believe they missed the point that we are approaching a sea change in where peoples attention is. It is the first sign that status quo maybe changing. Ours was just the one data set that suggests this – and it is consistent with international trends we have been seeing. We also didn’t say TV was dead – that was Neil Shoebridge…

Comments anyone?!

More Google shenanigans on April 1...

In addition to the previous post with Google's breakthrough gDay search, a quick trip to google.com.au gives you a link to Become a Virgle Pioneer. Apparently Google and Virgin (Richard Branson's company) are teaming up to get 100,000 people in an inhabitable colony on Mars within 100 years.

It has some sense of authority, but given its April 1, and the people involved, it has to be a prank. You can also fill out a questionnaire to see if you will be eligible, a possible answer to the question: "How would you describe your physical fittness" is 'Great. I'm totally buff.'

April Fool's - Google Way

Search tomorrow's web today... In true Google fashion..another great innovative technology solution.

The following stunt was released to the unsuspecting public today (lifted directly from our friends at Google):

About gDay™ technology

The core technology that powers gDay™ is MATE™ (Machine Automated Temporal Extrapolation).

Using MATE’s™ machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques developed in Google’s Sydney offices, we can construct elements of the future.

Google spiders crawl publicly available web information and our index of historic, cached web content. Using a mashup of numerous factors such as recurrence plots, fuzzy measure analysis, online betting odds and the weather forecast from the iGoogle weather gadget, we can create a sophisticated model of what the internet will look like 24 hours from now.

We can use this technique to predict almost anything on the web – tomorrow’s share price movements, sports results or news events. Plus, using language regression analysis, Google can even predict the actual wording of blogs and newspaper columns, 24 hours before they’re written!

To rank these future pages in order of relevance, gDay™ uses a statistical extrapolation of a page’s future PageRank, called SageRank.

gDay™ and MATE™ were developed in Google’s Sydney R&D centre.
Looks like this isn't the first time Google has pulled a stunt like this. See attached link from Techcrunch:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/31/gmail-april-fools-not-very-funny-on-the-upside-they-started-a-wikipedia-war/