Almost forgot about this one. Pretty spot on, considering it was published 15 years ago.
Web 3.0 ads = big yawn?
Another day, another keynote on how tweaking ad placement just a little bit more will save day… So R/W/W has this post on a keynote speech from Web 3.0 Conference in Santa Clara by Amiad Solomon from Peer39. All in all he makes a good case on how the semantic web concept can be applied to improve targeting accuracy, which is probably true, specially in the long tail.
However, the reasoning is still stuck in the “right product to the right person at the right time” paradigm. The bottleneck for online advertising nowadays isn’t targeting, it’s getting people to see the ad… targeting is great all in all, but the reason for the arbitrage between online media consumption and ad spend is simply that brand advertisers don’t have an appealing model to create demand for products and brands which people don’t know they want. One more time - if people don’t see your ad, it doesn’t matter if they’re in your targeting audience (or that they’re in desperate need of your product for that matter).
So, we need to leverage data beyond simple targeting and instead use it as input to remix the message and content so that the shape of the ad will appeal to each unique viewer…. which is what we’re going for (shameless plug) at Burt. Looking forward to releasing Copybox and Meme Machine, just a month or three away from showing what we’re going for and why it will spark a creative explosion!
Yeah, yeah… maybe then people will get it ;) More on this next wednesday, when I’m speaking at Web 2.0 Europe. See you there!
We build together. Using Sekai camera.
Finally. Techcrunch50 has put up the extremely entertaining presentation held by Tonchidot, a japanese company that wants to push the envelope in mobile.
Their attitude is beyond awesome, an inspiration for anyone who wants to do something different.
So. Let’s build together. Using imagination.
Copybox by Burt, TechCrunch50 and reactive ads
So I’m in San Francisco for the week, and we’re on Techcrunch50 about to present Copybox, the “Photoshop for copywriters” that’s our first product to officially launch from Burt.
The ideas that are created in Copybox are built around the concept of “reactive advertising”. Reactive ads represents a shift from focusing onwho gets shown what (content, ads etc.), to how stuff is presented when it’s shown… reactive ads are thus shaped by the circumstances for each exposure.
Reactive ads leverage the same pool of mined data that’s currently being used for ad targeting, recommendation engines, mash-ups etc. and hits the advertising sweet spot by enabling publishers to better monetize their data and ad inventory, and at the same time responding to advertisers’ urgent need for increased visibility and impact of their digital campaigns.
I’ll get back to a more complete post on this subject, once I get some feedback from this week, which will be a huge leap forward in making this type of ads come true all over the web.
More posts from me on the subject of reactive ads:
Reactive advertising - a meme is born
Quality of social networking ads
Reactive ads and the Web 2.0 expo
Wish me luck!
The most interesting social network?
So the other day I get asked which social network I found most interesting right now. Since social networks have been kind of boring lately I answered “Facebook”, motivating it with some lame rant about them being first to correctly model the user’s social behavior, the feed (which I actually don’t find that amazing) and then showing that they weren’t just a one hit wonder when they launched their platform play. Yawn. Right?
But what would be the “right” answer? After thinking about it some more, I still find Flickr the most interesting one, since they managed to cultivate such a creative atmosphere, look and feel. Or maybe it’s LinkedIn, aspecially from a business standpoint with their sky high RPMs, potential for becoming (they already are) a major player for recruitment etc. Or maybe it’s the metaplatform play of Ning, the social network to end all social networks?
The right answer, of course, is no social network is interesting by it self. At least not anymore. The interesting stuff are the services and features that can be enabled the social web as a whole, by using the social graph (lacking a better word) and the content produced with social distribution in mind. I can’t see why Facebook, MySpace and others will be able to keep apps from being distributed, since the limitations in those environments limits the quality that one can achieve in terms of features and user experience.
So the companies to watch aren’t the social networks in themselves, but the initiatives leveraging multiple social networks such as Slide or Rockyou, or data portability such as MySpace/Google Friend Connect, modular publishing platforms such as Wordpress etc, pushing the platform from being an individual social *network*, to the social *web* as a whole.
Wanted: new architecture for writing creative briefs
So I’ve been experimenting with a couple of different models for writing creative briefs lately. Last time someone did something good in the area, was when Jon Steel released his to-be-bible of Account Planning in the mid-late nineties.
However, the conditions for creating advertising (even the definition of advertising) have shifted drastically in the last ten years. We now have one billion more options in terms of media, technology and consumer habits to take into account. Consumers are blocking out ads like never before, and with the rise WOM-hyping, virals and social networks, agencies even consider them to be a plausible channel for distributing a message. Also, clients have started doing their own planning, make changes later in projects and are demanding accountability. There’s also the issue of cross-agency collaboration, since media fragmentization and finite consumer attention, has boosted the relevance of niche agencies, that use their target audience and/or media specific knowledge increase cut thru and impact.
Planning has always been pretty unglamorous, but now it seems like the major bottleneck for creating effective advertising so maybe it’s time to get our act together ;) Sadly, it seems like Jon’s elegant and simple template to writing creative briefs simply doesn’t hold up anymore. Unless the planner is beyond awesome, that is. And the client has to provide the resources and business insights to leverage the planner’s awesomeness. But the bulk planners and clients are, by definition, average.
One could argue that the creative brief is a possible competitive advantage for agencies, but I think hogging a format would be counter-productive since creative briefs will need to be distributed and adapted across agencies and clients. Also, the learning curve for new clients and creatives, account directors, project managers etc. should be quick and easy. And, as I’ve learned, it needs to be enforced on a agency-wide scale… and for that to happen it needs to be compatible with the current Porter-Levitt-Steel-Mintzberg-Ries-Aaker-influenced-model. Meaning the use of abstractions no-one really agrees on, like “positioning”, “strategy”, “target audience” (mostly because most people haven’t bothered to actually read Positioning, Marketing Imagination, Building Strong Brands, Truth lies and advertising, Rise and fall of strategic planning etc.).
Basically, we need to establish some rough default structure that everyone get the hang on to increase the average quality of what creatives have to act on when trying to win the next grand-prix in Cannes. As for me, I’ll be posting a suggestion here in the next week or so.
Any suggestions?
Online advertising: now what?
So 2007 was the year that Internet made it to the big league as an ad medium. In Sweden, it’s suppposedly the second largest paid ad media, after print.
But what happens now when Internet needs to pull it’s own weight? No TV or radio to help us drive awareness of our fabulous campaigns. Or at least less of both, and less print as well.
Banners? Widgets? Gadgets? Facebook apps? OpenSocial apps? Text ads? Advertorials? My guess is that 2008 is the year we find out.
Finally some future
Coudal was terrific, making a down to earth and crystal clear presentation of The Deck, which is my favorite up and coming ad network. Favorite quote (on ads integrated in RSS-feeds): “We are testing some technology on this… ah… technology… it’s not actually so much technology as it is a guy hacking together some code”. Brilliant.
Google has no faith in technology
So the PhDs over at Google obviously had some time to spare and did a math excercise to see how long it would take them to complete their mission to collect and structure all the information in the world. The answer? 300 years, since apparantly there is 5 million TBs of data and Google has so far collected 170 TBs.
The problem for most blogs I read commenting on these figures is that most information is stored inside peoples head which I recon will be solved pretty soon, with Ray Ks singularity coming up any day now (and that guy’s never wrong).
Simple math excercise says that Google has then collected about 25 TBs per year since they went into business in ‘98… so obviously they would have to speed up their information collection procedures a bit to get all 5 million TBs before 2300.
Assuming that this bulk of information is static (which is pretty stupid and I somewhat assume that he everyday mensa convention that is Google has taken this into consideration) it only takes a 4 percent increase per annum in information collection efficiecy to map all the information. They’re obviously not anticipating any disruptive leaps in technology anytime soon, instead opting for a Kaizen/Cani-style approach (which would explain the 300-year plan) of continuous improvement. Very eighties, if you ask me.
Apart from their lack of leapfrogging enthusiasm I recon that there’s another big problem with their collect-all-the-information-from-all-over-the-world-megalomaniac-mission: what if people, companies, orgs etc. don’t want to participate in collecting all this information? It’s not like Google built the Internet or anything (although if their quest for world domination continues to go as planned, the Google-branded history e-books of 2300 it will probably say they did). I’m always amazed by the common assumption that everyone wants to be listed on Google (or any other search engine for that matter). Just ask the writers guild how they feel and take a look at how Google is handling that situation. And btw, considering how Google and Yahoo is handling that whole China-debacle, would you really let them jack into your head?
And in the long run, who cares about information anyway? Information does not equal knowledge, good luck with solving that algorithm. I hereby predict some dialectic shifts à la Hegel coming up pretty soon with a knowledge-scouring company building on some wicked singularity related socioholistic approach, chewing Google for breakfast. How I wan’t live to see the day… and according to Ray Kurzweil I just might!
