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OK so this is a tad self promotional but there’s something in it for you so don’t be too quick to judge. I will be presenting at this year’s Sydney ad:tech and if, despite this announcement, you were still thinking of attending (16th and 17th March) then drop me a line (marc@thinqdigital.com.au) as I can send you a code that scores 20% off your ticket(s). Here endeth the promotion.
"...Mum’s no fool and she’d never shell out more money for less milk."
It’s generally accepted that a litre of milk gets more expensive every year, an unfortunate economic reality we call inflation. But can you imagine how angry mum would be if an additional $0.10 in price was inversely matched by a 50ml reduction in volume? This is all hypothetical of course because mum’s no fool and she’d never shell out more money for less milk.
But this is exactly what’s happening in the world television and press advertising. Less milk (audience) is starting to cost advertisers more money.
Ham? Maybe.
Wine? Quite possibly.
Limited strenuous exercise? Almost certainly.
There are a number of reasons why my fingers might feel fatter in 2010, that’s “twenty ten” people, not “two thousand and ten”. Stop wasting good syllables. A problem shared is a problem halved, so I decided to discuss my condition with a few close friends. Turns out a number of the folks I surveyed were also suffering from podgy digit disorder. After much contemplation we uncovered a common factor in the way we all behaved over the Christmas holidays.
We had all spent more time playing with our iPhones. From DoodleJump to Tweetie we’d all been tapping, swiping and pinching far more than your average working week and it was starting to have physical effects. Or so we thought. Why else would we be tapping a back link when we were trying to hit the search field?
Came across this thanks to Barb Dybwad over at Mashable. Although the application of spelling your own company name in images from Flickr is fun for about five seconds, the idea of mashing images with text in general has some cool campaign applications.
Given the idea of personalising HTML e-mail campaigns with “Dear <Firstname>” is now the rule, rather than the exception, marketers need to find new ways of delivering personalisation to achieve cut-through and the ability to mash in images on-the-fly offers a whole new range of creative opportunities.
“It’s good to talk“, said Bob Hoskins in the British Telecom (BT) campaign of the mid 1990s.
Here we had the largest telco in the UK encouraging folks to talk more to each other. Great advice, as things do tend to happen when people have conversations. Shame they couldn’t apply some of this thinking in their own back yard instead of throwing dollars at “solutions” that prevented conversations. A decade on and we’ve been paid back with Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and Auto Attendant technology, technological gatekeepers to the conversation. I haven’t witnessed such a relentless investment in technology, in spite of consumer needs, since the amphibious car.
If, like me, you’ve been thinking about using eye-tracking studies to improve your user-centred design process but were unsure of where to start – well you’re in luck. I was fortunate enough to bump into James Breeze the CEO (his card has it as “Chief Experience Officer”) of Objective Digital at last weeks iMedia Summit. Objective Digital is the official Australian/New Zealand reseller of Tobii Eye Trackers well regarded as the world leader in eye-tracking hardware and software solutions.
James took the time to give me a one-to-one tutorial on the system and point out it’s less obvious benefits. I must admit I was surprised by how easy the system was to operate and how quick results were mapped. Now these machines aren’t cheap ($70,000 plus) but if you’re not sure it’s going to get enough use, then Objective offers them for hire (daily or monthly rates apply) and if you can choose to book them with or without an operating consultant.
An experienced digital marketer and self-confessed Internet addict, Kristen specialises in helping brands use social media to build engagements, foster brand advocacy and generate positive word-of-mouth online.
In her previous role as the Creative Director for Attention – a New York based boutique digital agency – Kristen helped build and execute social media strategies for the agency’s impressive client roster, including: MAC Cosmetics, Aveda, Ritz-Carlton, Bluefly, Newsweek, Clinique, Hudson Jeans and Mashable.
OK, so Gartner recently revealed that Smart Phone sales were up 27% (whilst standard mobile sales were down 6%). The iPhone was a major contributor with 13% of all new handsets sold in 2nd quarter 2009 up from 3% in the corresponding period of 2008.
I haven’t seen a personal device get traction like this since the Sony Walkman in the 80s and there’s a real simple reason. It’s not the phone, the phone is actually rubbish – it’s the promise of a truly decent mobile web experience. The crux of which lies in the ability to zoom in and out with ease – funny that whilst the cynics were saying that mobile web will never work because the screen is too small, Apple invented a way to take screen size out of the picture…so to speak.
And Joe Public loves this new type of web experience. According to AdMob’s April 2009 Mobile Metrics Report Apple’s iPhone accounted for 43% of all mobile web traffic despite having just 8% of all handset sales in the same period. So, mobile internet usage is on the march and yet many digital marketing folks don’t seem to be paying attention.
There is a time and a place for the all singing, all dancing rich media ads that literally jump from the page, spin around and attempt to “cut-through”but let’s not also forget the gentle art of contextual web advertising – the art of making advertising “a part of the page”, something to read, not something to block.
This isn’t solely about disguising ads to look like content. It is also about taking a broader view of the publisher’s audience, what’s missing from their user experience and delivering an “ad” at the right time and in the right place in a language and tone consistent with the content they are viewing.
Hate to use the same old examples but probably the best example of this strategy in effect is Google Adwords/Adsense. The ads are visually similar to the page content, they are (often) content matched and form a part of the site’s function (the ads are search results from a search engine).
The 4Ps of the marketing mix are written in stone (Price, Product, Place, Promotion). Etched beneath are the 3 additional Ps of the service marketing mix (Physical Evidence, Process and People).
The last of these, ‘People’, refers to the folks we employ and how they communicate with customers. But in the age of the Internet,the population is beginning to dictate the types of product/service people would like to see – they are the ones initiating the communication not the organisation.
This ‘Public Input’ is beginning to have an impact in the mix and some organisations are harnessing it’s power. Running shoes designed by the customer, ads designed by the audience; it’s early days but the newly empowered general public are finding their feet and beginning to voice their opinion.
AdMob advertising blend contextual digital Eye Tracking Facebook Facebook turns 6 Flash Gartner Internet iPhone kristen media Mobile online planning rich social media marketing campaign strategic thinking thinq Tobii usability vang
