January 25, 2010
There are many fine sports commentators.
However, only a few act as the soundtrack to one’s childhood. One of them, Bill McLaren died last week.
He created the language of rugby and in doing so greatly enriched English as a whole. McLaren painted pictures using words or phrases which developed their own meaning. Since rugby is a fast moving game and the quality of camera work was sometimes less than great, his work had almost more in common with radio than TV. All the obituaries reminded us of the immense homework, McLaren did, the pack of cards with which he practiced the names of the players in forthcoming matches. This was vital to the execution of the piece. However, my great memories are of descriptions of beautiful aptness. “A man covering a substantial acreage”, “built like a brick outhouse” or “like a double-decker bus”. There is an almost Homeric use of epithets in expressions like “the Waikato farmer, Colin Meads”, said with a combination of awe and menace. McLaren had a respect for the big men who dominate rugby forward play. Besides which he forced the middle classes to work out what a brick outhouse was.
McLaren had been robbed of a Scottish cap as a wing forward by TB. He knew where the forwards came from: coalmines and steelworks in Wales, the Border farms of Scotland and perhaps strangest of all, the London and Irish medical schools. When rugby’s leviathans boiled over, it was a “bit of argy-bargy” not foul play at least until the referee called it that. McLaren understood. He didn’t just describe; he commentated. And yet, McLaren’s real delight was in great back play. He coached in the Scottish Borders where till the 1990s, there was a constant conveyor belt of quick passing, thinking players, some of whom like Tony Stanger he coached. Listening this weekend of the charming 1971 Scotland-Wales game you find the McLaren commentary almost like a rhythmical accompaniment to the exquisite Welsh inter-passing. All the same, one learns clearly who has the ball at each moment and a joy at seeing it handled and run onto so beautifully even if it was at the cost of McLaren’s Scotland.
I only ever wanted to impersonate two commentators: John Arlott, the cricket specialist, and McLaren. However, a listener knew accurately from cadences of his voice that Arlott was a difficult man, not at ease with himself. By contrast, McLaren lived a life of joy, not because his life was materially different but you could tell it from his language, the excitement at good things. As a child, I wanted to be McLaren. He could feel how ordinary listeners would be seeing a game while leaving us comparing gorgeous phrases used to describe his favourite players. The Bill trademark “xyz school will be very proud of ab, one of their former pupils” and “they’ll be dancing in the streets of” whichever town a star player or winning team just reflected this. A little bit of our childhood moved on last week.
January 9, 2010
The Consumer Electronics Show and the Adult Entertainment Expo are running concurrently in Las Vegas. The technology folk are in the main Convention Center, the early adopters are in the Sands Convention Center a mile or so away.
CES is a remarkable experience, an assault on the senses in its own right magnified by the sheer ‘ubergauche’ of Vegas itself. There’s lots there but it seems like the new new thing is 3D and the assumption is that Avatar has acted as the launch pad to take home theater and gaming into an extra dimension. Personally the 3D experience makes me nauseous and I am also quite fond of multi-tasking (nachos, beer, salsa, Blackberry etc) while watching TV and that’s tough when wearing the required eye glasses.
Outside of 3D my sense was that everything else was notable largely for being either smaller, thinner or bigger than that which preceded it. All in all there’s not a whole lot of difference between the shows other than pocket protectors at CES and some other protection down the street, it’s also not hard to predict where 3D will penetrate first.
January 4, 2010
Google is a very smart company. Their lobby runs seamlessly from Madison Avenue to Pennsylvania Avenue. The picture to the left shows they will stop at nothing.
The way to a media buyer’s heart is through his dog and, on behalf of Alfie and myself’ we say thanks to the Googlers for this splendid coat and hereby declare a conlict of interest!
January 1, 2010
Somewhere in the ancient scrolls of American media and telecommunications two truths are written:
1. cable companies shall not pay broadcasters to carry their signal
2. manufacturers of mobile devices will sign exclusive distribution agreements with phone networks
By the end of the first full week of the decade we will know if Fox will have forced Time Warner’s hand on carriage fees and if Google will really launch the unlocked Nexus in a challenge to Apple, AT&T, Verizon and the rest.
These two events along with potential charging for online content from News Corp, Hulu and others, the publishing industry’s e reader initiatives, Apple’s tablet, the continued drive to addressable television and the FTC’s decisions on Net Neutrality suggest that a broad ranging exploration of the economics of content, devices and distribution will dominate the media news of early 2010.
For the most part advertisers will sit on the sidelines of these issues which is not to say that they won’t be impacted by the outcome. As the economics of communications change so does the way consumers receive and interact with content and that includes advertising.
November 17, 2009
We all know the challenges presented by the decline of the interruptive advertising model and the threat of ad avoidance enabled by complex technology like the DVR and the simpler notion of having better things to do.
One of the more surprising resolutions to the issue may be inherent in a patent applied for by Apple that will disable the functionality of software unless its user demonstrates attention to the advertising carried by the application in question.
Apart from sounding more like a lemon than an Apple this idea is as flawed as every other bribevertising model ever created. Forced consumption of advertising simply does not work. The battlefield of the web is is littered with the grave markers of ‘click on ad, earn points’ businesses that produce splendid volumes of enquiries and dismal levels of conversion for the simple reason that the click was driven by desire for points and not by interest in the product advertised.
Advertiser patience for non-converting inquiries is somewhere between momentary and non-existent and such programs end up in the same bucket as click fraud in short order.
Businesses file patents all the time that they don’t intend to use or of which they make think better. This one seems different because it’s Apple that has applied for it. Despite that my guess is that wise heads will prevail and that Apple won’t corrupt its unique status in the brand pantheon with such an ugly resolution to a business problem.
November 14, 2009
I was charmed by this. Beckham and the LA Galaxy defeat the Houston Dynamo 2-0 but only after an incident that caused some consternation for the sponsor of the stadium. According to ESPN…
“Play was suspended twice after the stadium lights went out because of power dips, a release from the Home Depot Center said. The game was stopped for a 18 minutes in each half.”
November 12, 2009
The separation of audience from context is a much discussed if unresolved argument. The general thesis of the ‘pork bellies versus diamonds’ debate is either that context amplifies the value of messaging or that audience is everything and the cost and targeting advantages more than offset the specifics of contextual relevance. The seller community is neatly divided on this issue with producers of original content on one side and ad networks, by and large, on the other. Readers will be relieved to know that this post is not on that topic.
A more profound degree of separation may be the idea that the commercial message no longer requires the carriage vehicle of media at all. This argument was made at an IAA gathering in Tokyo by Masataka Hosagane an executive creative director at Dentsu. Mr. Hosagane showed some creative work for a PS3 game, Last Man Everywhere, and an innovative hybrid of a children’s book and an I Phone (called PhoneBook of course) and described both of them as communication ideas ‘beyond the frame’.
Without doubt, both were compelling and both seemed to be independent of any given distribution channel. The specifics of these pieces are less important than the growing notion that there are more and more marketing communications in the form of seeded video in general and applications in particular that are intended for peer to peer distribution and thereby bypass paid distribution channels and, by extension, the invoicing departments of media vendors. The most obvious manifestation of this trend is the spawning of brand owner iPhones and Droid apps from a raft of advertisers big and small that fill the marketing trades on a daily basis.
The problem, however, is this. Firstly it is hard to really gain traction in an environment shared with 100,000 other apps, secondly all the data suggests that even the most successful apps with significant download volume trail off in usage with a rate of decay that is alarmingly precipitous. Finally, consumers en masse don’t read the marketing trades. The maintenance of reach, recency and frequency remain an essential plank of any brand marketing strategy that depends on durable visibility and it’s simply not possible to maintain a flow of apps and sustained usage that can fulfill this role.
As a consequence the frame remains central to the message distribution process and those applications that break out should be celebrated as a supplement but not relied upon as a replacement.
November 12, 2009
Samsung has announced the launch of its own smartphone software and developer platform. They have named it BADA which, as you all know is the Korean word for ocean.
Now we can only hope that they integrate Microsoft’s search platform for the corporate naming event of the year.
November 9, 2009
This image is a promotion for Windows 7 in Tokyo. No comment required
November 8, 2009
It is perfectly obvious that the only marketing activity that influences the sale of detergent is the number of facings in the store. The shopper goes to the store, they are arrested by the display and they buy. As a consequence the entire marketing budget should be expended on securing that shelf space.
Given this quite obvious correlation between the last pre-purchase exposure to the brand and the purchase itself it is perhaps surprising that the brand’s owners do not allocate budgets in this way and instead spend significant amounts of money all the way back from the shelf to the living room of the prospective buyer. They do this because they know, through a heady cocktail of regression analysis and common sense, that multiple contact points contribute to the emotional and rational preconditions for purchase.
These days we call this attribution modelling. We attempt to ascribe values to actions and attempt to create a communications recipe from assorted ingredients in order to create the intended outcome. This is not to underestimate the value of shelf space and most brand owners do not.
More puzzling is what to do about digital shelf space. It’s been said by wiser commentators than me that the results pages of search engines are very often the first digital touch point for brands and this has been extrapolated to describing those very results as shelf space. In the event that the shelf puts the consumer a click away from a transaction, this description has resonance. When it does not the analogy fades in both accuracy and relevance yet in both cases there is an assumption among the sellers of search clicks that budget allocation should start with them and only go to other channels when sufficient funds are allocated to capture every available click.
This represents a compound fallacy. First, wider marketing activity drives clicks; second, a huge quantity of consumer interaction with brands remains unmediated by search and third, if all marketers drank the same Kool Aid with the suggested vigor the results would be an inflationary spiral and an unwinnable game.
Search strategy is brand specific, it requires a determination of how and why people become aware of brands and of the path to preference and purchase. It requires knowledge of the brand’s channels to market and of the relative influence of each touchpoint. The focus needs to be on share of wallet in the category and not on share of clicks. The binary nature of search metrics is seductive but not everything that seduces you is good for you.
This is not the first time this blog has mused on this topic and it won’t be the last. Search has costs and it has opportunity costs. The attraction is that the costs are incurred against actions rather than exposures. The opportunity cost is related to those options you decline in order to fund those actions.
