AdTech Melbourne, 2011 the low down

From David Trovell, Starcom Melbourne Strategy Director:

ICANN is about to change the internet forever, there are no digital gurus, Microsoft Kinect is the fastest selling consumer device in history and other things I learnt at Ad:Tech Melbourne. #atmelb

The day1 keynotes at AdTech Melbourne had thrown up some great content, could the rest of the conference match up? I hoped so seeing as I was one of the speakers!

Before I get to Day2 keynotes here are a few nuggets that caught my eye from other presentations.

• There are now over 208m domain names; the .com or .org world as we know it is nearly full. So from Dec 2011 get ready for shoes.nike, barina.car and fifa.football. That’s right, TLDs (Top Level Domain names) are opening up. If you are not preparing for this change get on it quick. More info at http://mashable.com/2011/03/28/new-era-top-level-domains/
• “Think Mobile First” was a key message from many speakers. When designing online experiences make them great on mobile first. ¼ of all internet traffic, 1/3 of Facebook use and ½ of all tweets are mobile; and by 2013, 93% of phones sold will be smartphones (up from 54% in 2010).
• Better access to video content looks set to massively increase the amount we view. In the 70’s the average US TV viewer watched 17 hours of video (TV) a week, for the last decade viewing has been stable at 35 hrs, in 3yrs this figure is expected to hit 50hrs per week!
• Australians are the fastest adopters of iPads in the world. 8% of homes have one already.
• Communities like GoMiso and GetGlue are making TV viewing more social; will this save ‘appointment to view’ TV? Certainly it’s a growing trend and will only get bigger with GoogleTV.

Day2 keynote presentations summed up the good and bad of Ad:Tech.

First up was the kind of presentation that I had most feared from AdTech; a social media expert who judged success by the number of likes on facebook. In fairness, Jesse Ringham, digital manager from Tate Gallery in London, did have some good examples of social media. I like the way Tate use guest editors of their FB page, and their rule of, “reward, don’t broadcast” is a wise one. But his myopic view of digital was at odds with most speakers who stressed the importance of judging digital based on real business goals. He can be summed up by the quote, “well everyone is on Twitter now so…”.

However, the day was saved by Haresh Khoobchandani, CMO of Microsoft Asia Pacific. Luckily I did not have to introduce him (!). Haresh was full of good quotes,
“In the future no one will believe your brand”. Already, 90% of people trust peer recommendation but only 14% trust advertising.
“the future is here, it’s just not widely distributed yet” – nice quote!
“there are no digital gurus, we are all just students learning everyday”
“social media should be a feature not a destination of marketing strategy”
“marketing has moved from communications to conversations”
“Kinect is the fastest selling consumer device in history, with 8m units sold in 2-months”
Haresh was an excellent speaker and to hear the CMO of Microsoft say that there are no digital gurus was quite refreshing. He also admitted to being nervous about speaking these days because of the rise instant feedback via Twitter.

We were up next (Shannon Curtis from Target, Jamie Silver from ClearLight Digital and I) and the topic we had been given was, “what should a digital strategy look like?” Our three different view points worked well, Shannon’s inside view of getting different functions to work together, Jamie’s practical guide to digital strategy and my broader view of how digital fits into communications strategy.

Opening with the line, “I don’t believe in digital” did open a few eyes, but closing with “digital is the oxygen of marketing” (stolen from John Sintras) meant I did not get lynched on the way out. Also, it was interesting to see which parts of my presentation attracted tweets.

Overall Ad:Tech’s first appearance in Melbourne was a good one, a broad range of topics and lots of good speakers (IE Media’s Justin Wilden was excellent) but Bonin Bough from Pepsi stole the day. One final quote from Bonin, “multi-tasking is as addictive as heroin”!

High time for real time print measurement

The world continues to develop at a breakneck speed and nowhere is this more true than marketing and advertising. Every day marketers and their agencies make communications decisions. The old days of long term planning and buying are well behind us. Ongoing planning and optimisation in real time is increasingly the order of the day, and many clients now employ marketing dashboards to analyse marketing initiatives in real time.

The print medium, particularly newspapers, should be well placed in such an environment. Never have people interacted more with the content generated by our major mastheads, and yet the only story marketers get to hear is that newspaper and magazine circulations continue to decline. Yes that may be true of the print only version, but is it true of total circulation and readership across both print and digital content? Unlikely.

Unfortunately, the global development of print metrics to meet the requirements of a real time world has been positively glacial. In Australia, I started the discussions as then head of the MFA some seven years ago. Fortunately we have had some significant movement since then, but there is still a way to go.

It must be said that many people are now keen to make our print measurement as relevant as possible, and I feel more confident that real change is possible now more than ever before. The ABC executive and committee are enthusiastic and willing. The AANA and MFA both have dedicated teams prepared to help. The Newspaper Works has already moved forward with The Readership Works which will provide competition in Australia for the first time in a generation through the successful tenderer Ipsos. And at a meeting last week with The Newspaper Works’ new Chairman Greg Hywood and the board seemed keen to take on the challenge of more frequent circulation data for major newspapers.

We have already seen the introduction of quarterly circulation audit data for major newspapers and weekly magazines. Last week, The Newspaper Works also announced that newspaper publishers will start to report Monday to Friday day of week sales as part of their quarterly audits from July; another step in the right direction. A framework for the reporting of all digital sales has also been developed and will hopefully be voted on favourably by the ABC members for adoption later this year.

What is required now is the final move to circulation data for each publication, whether daily, monthly or quarterly. There may well be technical and cost difficulties with such a move, but a road map must be created now. No one is keen to impose unreasonable costs on publishers, so perhaps a combination of audits and voluntary reporting, co-ordinated through the ABC, might provide an answer.

The magazine publishers though are hesitant. In addition to cost and technical concerns, they argue that cover information is sensitive and publishing sales data for each issue dilutes competitive advantage. But is this really an argument? Surely they must already have a reasonable idea of competitors’ sales through their own tracking mechanisms. And don’t advertisers deserve to know how much each issue is circulating? Further, publishers could leverage more frequent data and move to a more dynamic pricing model based around higher selling issues.

More frequent readership reporting is also warranted. It is a nonsense to be using six monthly data for publications that are sold daily and weekly. New digital methodologies should allow us to start moving towards a more useable interval such as monthly reporting, hopefully something that The Readership Works and Ipsos is thinking through in addition to the incumbent Morgan.

Arguably newspaper and magazine content is as dynamic now as it ever was. You only need to witness the huge appetite for news around the extraordinary number of recent world disasters. What a shame that the print industry has not been able to capitalise on this upswing in news interest with real time measurement data. Yes, it’s high time that print measurement got real time.

Written by John Sintras for afr.com and published 17.03.11

Why buy ad space when you can create it?

Pop band Weezer’s latest album, Hurley, launched earlier this week (Sept 14), and rather than simply buying ad space to promote the launch they have enlisted the help of ‘Youtube celebrities’ to help get the word out.

With the help of music distribution and marketing specialist DashGo, Weezer reached out to 75 popular YouTube creators and invited them to include the band in their videos.

“To facilitate this free-form taping, they set aside two days in a Los Angeles studio with instructions that read, “We’re up for just about anything that can be filmed in the studio. The finished clip will be yours to release and distribute on Sept. 14, 2010. […] It was then up to the YouTubers-whose channels have millions of subscribers and aggregated well over a billion total video views-to write and produce the segments with the band.” The creators were also encouraged to include copy which promoted the album release, but weren’t required to.
http://www.musicreview.co.za/2010/09/15/weezer-invades-youtube-on-hurley-release-date/

On Tuesdays YouTube regularly promotes ‘Music Tuesday’ on their homepage, allowing many of these videos to be promoted in front of a global audience of 24 million plus people in one day (Comscore, July 2010).

Weezer were able to capitalise on the built-in audience of these content creators (often in the hundreds of thousands) as well as the millions who visit youtube.com everyday. These videos will undoubtedly be shared around the net as the band continues to grow their connection with YouTube from their video for Pork and Beans which featured many YouTube stars and has generated 2 million plus views.

For Weezer, who are known for their quirkiness, this is a perfect fit for their fans who are more than likely already fans of the various YouTube channels who promoted the band. It also allows the band to reach new audiences as people seek out the videos.

For many, there is a grey area around blogger outreach and what constitutes as ‘cash for comment’. If you pick your audiences and channels correctly and are able to work collaboratively on the creative development, then these programs can work much more effectively than a standard media buy.

More Info on Weezer's Hurley launch:
USA Today
AdWeek Blog
Clickz Marketing News

There’s a cloud on the horizon, and it has a silver lining

There’s a cloud on the horizon, and it has a silver lining

Written by John Sintras for afr.com

I was lucky enough to visit Microsoft HQ in Seattle last month, where I had the rare opportunity to look under the bonnet of this transformational organisation. To say I was impressed by what I saw would be an understatement. I’ve been to the future and back - and it is incredible and reassuringly human.

Most people don’t immediately think of Microsoft as a human-centric organisation, and yet all the technology and development I saw is being developed against a very real understanding of human needs. There is a focus on enhancing the way we live, with access to faster and cheaper devices that will enable a better lifestyle and more personalised essential information and entertainment. And there is an interconnectedness of data and devices that is both breathtakingly exciting and sinister in its Big Brother-like scope.

This all comes together in the Microsoft ‘Home of the Future’, built to demonstrate likely technological advances that will be available to the average person in developed economies over next five to 10 years.

Interestingly, it doesn’t look like a set from The Jetsons. It seems like any modern home at first glance, but it comes alive with simple interaction from the residents.

At the heart of all is cloud computing and services, which have been around for years, but are rarely talked about in marketing circles. Simply put cloud computing refers to the “services and applications hosted on and accessed through the internet. The cloud can connect people to the experiences they want, need and love – anytime, anywhere and on any device”. Some examples of current cloud services from Microsoft include Hotmail, Bing, and XBOX Live.

The cloud is the next big phase of digital transformation, and ultimately all platforms, data and applications can live there, serviced by giant global data centres that negate the need to store information and applications on hard drives and servers in the home and office. Behavior and preferences will also live in the cloud, assuming you access each application with a consistent user ID across all platforms and devices. So it will be able to constantly learn about you and offer up tailored content and experiences wherever you are.

Imagine the following possibilities;
- Access to any of your data and content on any device, anywhere, anytime
- Gesture and voice-based activation for everything
- Microchips in everything you purchase, scanned in real time so that your pantry or office can be replenished automatically and your preferences remembered
- Health data, collected by watches or worn devices, downloaded to your health profile in real time and virtually connected to your medical professional network – medications can then be ordered virtually based on your daily results
- Your environments and entertainment preferences automatically adjusted when you enter rooms and places
- Ongoing optimization of your preferences which can be accessed by authorised people, partners, suppliers, etc;
- Cheap digital screens and projectors everywhere, embedded in everyday items such as light bulbs and paper that can be projected onto any surface
- Virtual reality applications for everything from shopping to arm chair travel

It all sounds a bit incredible and you might think it’s unlikely to happen in your lifetime. But when you see it demonstrated in the Microsoft Home of the Future, it seems natural and inevitable. In fact much of the technology has already been invented. Gesture activation, for example, will start to become commonplace with the launch of XBox Connect in November, and we are already seeing virtual reality and 3D applications.

The implications for marketing and advertising are huge. It’s the ultimate in CRM and loyalty programs - optimization in real time based on your behavioural patterns and preferences. This will offer the opportunity to communicate to specific individuals in market for specific things in real time, anywhere they are, supported by digital tags on every purchase that can create an inventory of purchases in the home or office. Scary? Definitely. Exciting? Absolutely! It will create new markets and new winners and losers. And it will happen faster than you think.

If you think the pace of change is going to slow down, think again. Get ready to embrace the cloud services marketing opportunity, it will be the next massive digital transformation that will affect the way we way we live, communicate, market, distribute and advertise products and services.

Yvette Mayer profiled on Digital Ministry

Click here

Enabling Multi Platform Advertising

Last week I was invited to present at the 2010 Media and Broadcasting Congress. Here's what I had to say:

Enabling multi platform advertising

• What ad models work on what platform?
• Streamlining the advertising model to maximize results
• Uncovering the barriers to multi platform advertising
• The advertisers’ perspective on the evolution of platforms and ad spend

Introduction:

Multi platform advertising is nothing new to marketers, in days gone by it was more often referred to as a “multi media campaign”. The impact of digital technology has however shifted the goal posts. It’s no secret that today’s consumer has many more choices in how and when they interact with content; and subsequently shorter attention spans. And that it has subsequently become increasingly important for marketing communications to be more relevant, integrated, layered and interactive than they’ve ever been before. In essence, today a great comms idea must be bigger than the platform!

Inspired by the level of digital accountability, it’s also not enough to measure all of these efforts by channel. How we prepare for multi platform measurement is fundamental to increasing our ability to enable it.

So, who am I and why should you listen to me?

I’ve worked in the Australian media agency arena for some 20 years, half of which have been at Starcom. In that time, I’ve spent 17 years managing, strategising, planning and buying across all media channels, however, for the past three years I’ve been focused on digital specifically. I’ve experienced every medium from both a planning and a buying point of view and in particular the different nuances from trading approaches to trafficking.

Back to multi platform advertising….so what is it?

Actually, let’s start with the even simpler but also now more complex…. what is advertising?
One thing is for sure, it’s no longer just the ads made by the advertising agency. It’s any brand centric creative content. It’s the ads on TV and the video created by the teenager in your street. It’s the conversation you had with your mother about your new computer. Or the text message you got from the beautician. It can be paid, earned or/and owned. All of these connections are in essence message ‘platforms’.

So, in the face of all of this change, I believe the industry’s biggest challenge is to better understand the true value of all of these platforms and their relative impact on results. To do so time and cost effectively, we need new ways of measuring value. And even more challenging, (particularly for publishers), this will require a complete overhaul of how we trade including currency.

Our future goal should be management and measurement systems, where we are able to leverage and trade audiences across multiple technologies and touch points to measure and optimise impact and results.

What Ad models work on what platform

Up until recently the Australian industry almost exclusively worked on a “pay for total impact” model. Basically, you pay a price for media space (be that TV, outdoor, or a radio spot) no matter who/how many people end up seeing/hearing it.

With the advent of online, whilst the model sounded different – pay for the number of people (ie CPM), it was in essence a similar model. Multiply the estimated impression number by the CPM and once again you are paying a price for the space no matter who is impacted. The slight change in buying model to CPM did give us more control over the number of people (impressions bought), however, ‘the who’ remained the ‘whoever’. Ad exchanges are changing this but the main game remains the TPPL CPM.

Of course, it has been the responsibility of the media agency, to research and forecast target audience impact for the space and a more relevant measure of value for the individual client/product. Depending on quality of research by medium, this can be relatively accurate (TV) or quite weak (outdoor).

So in essence, we are trading across multiple data points, buying space across multiple mediums with no real visibility into audiences across mediums. It’s a silo-ed approach.

Enter Google, affiliate and performance networks.

In the past 5 years, however, due to the much more accountable nature of digital, we have seen a rapid increase in a move towards paying for a result. At the softer end we have the cost per click model, excellent for driving traffic to a site (and hopefully more experience of the brand /product), and even better for those with a strong e-commerce model the CPA – where ROI is relatively straight forward to demonstrate. Cue joy and delight from clients who have the ability to show their CEO an accurate cost per acquisition!

The ability to buy a result*, across multi platform is without question the future of our industry. The ability to transact in this way online has awakened the natural desire of marketeers to do so. But I think you’ll agree when it comes to a solution we’ve got a long way to go.

*Result – not simply sales, but could be awareness, engagement, consideration, intention

Streamlining ad models to maximise results

We all recognise that we are moving to a data driven future. One where we have the ability (and often the desire) to communicate “one to one” rather than “one to many”; efficiently and at scale. Consumers expect more personalisation – and are more influenced by it. Buying space is becoming less and less relevant.

I’m sure you’ll agree, as a result, it’s time for the industry to start re-thinking sales models. We need a new currency and we need to be talking the same language.

My thoughts are that it would make more sense for us to buy an audience rather than a space. Why? The way I see it is that if you think about a continuum, with paying for space by media at one end, and paying for a result across multiple media at the other, paying for an audience, is moving in the right direction.

With the increasing ability for publishers to create more valuable audiences through improved audience data, this is a model that makes sense for all parties.

In the meantime, Starcom (and some of our competitors) will continue to do what we can to consolidate data – or build our own to improve multi platform accountability.

We currently have a research study - Intentrak in market every week, which measures awareness, consideration, purchase, sales and after sale behaviour – across all touch points. It is helping us attribute value far better than ever before.

This is important in improving demonstrable ROI. It’s a step in the right direction. A step, publishers need to begin to embrace and plan for in terms of ad models of the future.

Uncovering the barriers to multi platform advertising

There are many barriers to multi platform advertising. But perhaps the biggest is our natural tendency as humans to resist change.

Critical barriers include:
* Slow moving big organisations with enormous legacy in infrastructure and internal barriers to overcome (if we are to see any innovation in currency)
* Multiple measurement systems and approaches across channels and contact points – siloed
* Understanding and attribution of the value of communication assets beyond paid media (earned and owned)
* Creative costing models not currently set up to create more content and maximise its personalisation and distribution
* Vested interest of ‘multi platform’ publishers in achieving multi platform within their own pool is limiting
* Lack of prioritisation of investment into research and data management at the client end
* Limited ability to interface data sets between clients, agencies and publishers

The Advertisers perspective on the evolution of platforms and ad spend

Surprise, surprise, the industry uses too much jargon!

On the surface, Marketers, feel comfortable with CPMs as they are used to this language.
When pressed, however, it is a different story. Comfortable and confident are two very different things.

Adding in new media has further complicated matters. In the online space there are literally thousands of CPMs spanning environments, formats and types of creative. Additionally, where in offline media the language is more often audience related, the CPMs on their digital plans are against all people. CPC/CPA models are preferred but not always relevant – eg when their goals are more relationship/awareness focussed. Back to the same old problems; inconsistent language and currency.

Some of our clients are attempting to address the new landscape through setting aside trial budgets with tangible metrics in place. Others are heavily data centric. The majority are risk adverse and more interested in advertising than research.

Overall, however, the general sentiment is that they welcome a day when all of their marketing efforts are more quantifiable and agree that digital is certainly putting pressure on them to deliver more transparent ROI back to the business.

To End

What we’re doing:

At Starcom, we are moving towards content management systems. Systems that can house all of the clients content assets (from social to PR) and allow us to micro segment and communicate with audiences. We believe this will allow us to improve interactions through more personalisation, leading to more influential connections.

But we can’t do this alone. We need all of you. At the moment our content systems manage primarily online data and assets. We look forward to a future when we can extend this to facilitate connections across multiple platforms. As I’m sure do all of our clients and customers – and hopefully you.

It’s time to get ready to measure and trade in the future.

To the clients reading this – I urge you to invest in research and data and to focus on measurable results.

To the creative agencies - It’s time to stop making ads and start focusing on ideas. Big ideas that live and breathe in multiple formats – and pricing so that clients can afford them. I know you feel pressured by the rise of content solution providers and publishers taking production in house. It’s time to change.

And to the publishers - I hope I haven’t offended. You are my peers and partners. But you need to get ready to change, and you need to do it together.

We Cannes create more Space for Ideas

Written by John Sintras in Cannes

It’s was huge privilege to be in Cannes for the Advertising Festival last week, an extraordinary experience on so many levels.

Human inspiration and ideas are the oxygen of our industry. As the world continues to move ahead at breakneck pace, and as the digital age pushes us further towards a 24/7 working mentality, it is critical that we all create more space for thinking, inspiration and ideas. To immerse ourselves in what it means to be human, and how we can create more meaningful brand experiences for our clients in the context of their world. More time to breathe in a little essential oxygen.

It’s a shame the Cannes festival is so far way from Australia as there is no better place to get an intense dose of oxygen than here. Cannes provides the opportunity to stop and think at the highest level. To examine not just the advertising world, but the whole world from many different perspectives. To meet and hear from extraordinary people within and outside our industry. To touch and feel global best practice in marketing and advertising communications. To be inspired by new thinking and ideas. And to be reminded that we work in an amazing industry that allows us to be immersed in and connected with humanity like no other job can.

The highlight of the week for me was the TED@Cannes seminar, the first time that this amazing format has been brought to the festival, facilitated by Starcom and Microsoft. While the majority of the festival provides a deep dive into the industry, TED@Cannes provided a “30,000 foot view of the ideas and trends that are shaping the future, and creating the context for the work we do”. We heard from eight extraordinary world thinkers on “global shifts in population and economics, new technologies that will redefine how we work and play, new models for collaboration and innovation, new insight into how ideas spread, and a new understanding of who we are, how we work, and why we do what we do”.

As I have listened to speakers and reviewed the work recognised at the festival, it continues to reinforce the appropriateness of our company’s focus on best understanding the human experience, and designing brand experiences that add value and meaning to people’s lives. Gimmicky, short term, technologically-led work does not cut it.

This year’s Media Grand Prix winner by Leo Burnett Sydney for Canon echoes this. Here is a campaign that humanises technology and recognises the interconnectedness of humanity – people inspiring other people, empowered by the client’s product and technology. It is interesting that this campaign came from the social media category. There is much debate on how to leverage social, with many clients unsure how to take advantage of this phenomenon. It’s work like this that recognises the role that technology plays in fulfilling human needs and desires that will pay the biggest dividend.

It was a great thrill to see our campaign for the Pedigree Dog Adoption Drive recognised with 2 Silver Media Lions. Again, here is a campaign that took a very human approach to the plight of shelter dogs. By telling real dog stories and integrating them into people’s lives in surprising and engaging ways, we were able to create a result that had never been achieved previously using more ‘traditional’ communications approaches.

This year’s results are again fuelling the debate about what is a creative versus media idea, and who should best drive strategic thinking. This really is an old-fashioned and limited argument. Media and creative thinking are both essential, one can’t be effective without the other. Great communications work today requires many smart people looking at the business from many different perspectives and levels. They don’t need to sit in one agency, and indeed it’s probably healthier if they don’t. But they do need to be aligned behind the same piece of human inspiration and work collaboratively. And who owns the idea? What a ridiculous question. Ultimately we hope the idea is owned by the people who embrace it into their lives, and the client for whom it creates a business result.

It was a great week. While we can’t all afford to be in Cannes every year, we can all afford to create a culture and workplace that makes the effort to create the space for ideas. A culture that lives the spirit of the Cannes festival every day.