How the evil Apple came good
Many years ago, when Eve in search of ingredients for a fruit salad, plucked the first apple from the tree, she created original sin.
Fast forward to the beginning of the Internet and the mutually opposing forces of creative and technology were pitched together in a battle of incompatibility as the Apple MAC and PC worked together as inefficiently as oil and water.
For me, like Eve, the Apple was like going to the dark side. But now, despite years of scathing vitriol and defence of the PC, I have truly fallen. First an iPod, then iPhone and now MacBook have become my weapons of mass consumption.
But for me what is important is not about falling for a company that has great advertising and even greater products. It is what they represent.
Apple has created the tools that further unlock the true potential of what the Internet was always conceived for. The ease of sharing and compatibility between the various tools is staggering. The ease of which I can join up my media consumption and share my communications across my favoured websites is phenomenal with an Apple in my hand.
And the debate about the iPad (which I don’t own) should not be about the device itself and it’s various merits or flaws, but about what it shows us is in the wind. The concept of the “empowered consumer” has become clichéd simply by the virtue of being trotted out so often. But we are empowered. We are masters of our own destiny. The iPad is simply a new and great expression of that allowing various media to be consumed in one place of choice.
And while I don’t question the lure and power of great advertising and how it can change peoples perceptions and likelihood to buy, if I were an advertising agency the question is not about ramping up digital capabilities, it is about going to the heart of the question and understanding what digital really means for us all.
I have just completed a week of training a team of red-hot graduates from a leading advertising agency in the opportunities of digital. As the end of our time together we debated “what next.” The over-riding feedback I got, was please could I give the training to the senior folk upstairs – the creative’s, the planners and account directors who’s default reaction is to turn to TV.
The force for change is coming from below and within. The future is happening now. If you don’t believe me, consume an Apple, and open your mind to the pleasures and opportunities awaiting you.
Filed by sam.brownfield on February 28th, 2010 under Rant or Rave? | 1 Comment »
Bringing Digital Media In From The Cold
When I first got involved in the agency world, “media”, once I’d worked out what that meant, was undoubtedly the last port of call in the development of any communication campaign. The ads were created in all their brilliance and then it was up to the media agency to get them in front of the appropriate audience.
More recently, somebody described media to me as dealt with by the office at the end of the corridor after the carpet had run out. Ouch!
And since the beginning of time, these media folk who look like the rest of us and talk roughly the same language have valiantly fought to demonstrate credibility in their science of media effectiveness and measurement.
Meanwhile the internet has supposedly ushered in the era of trackability and measurement. Web metrics, by which I mean the relatively hard data of visitors, dwell time and bounce are all very well, but they only inch us along the path towards any true concept of ROI.
In today’s world most accept and espouse that integration is the way forward and that digital is “just another channel.” But to too many that is just lip-service and for all the high-minded theory and expensive planning, the deliverable is still an unaccountable, high-cost, set-piece brand-benefit website. The days for the proponents of this dying art are numbered. And while clients slowly wake up to what they should be asking for, the rise of social media and mobile usage will continue to erode this long-standing folly.
The Internet is efficient at many things – low-cost, value-return, speed to market but above all, in today’s fragmented landscape its greatest benefit is in reach. (internet usage stats latest)
Recent research initiatives from Starcom MediaVest and much before it, shows that consumers who are exposed to brand messages across multiple touchpoints show a much higher propensity to buy/engage. TV is reinforced by print. Print is reinforced by online etc etc.
Online provides the opportunity to exponentially multiply exposure and to widen the reach of any well-conceived campaign beyond any media plan’s wildest ambitions.
The concept of earned media, which makes the blood of your average old-school media agency run-cold and then freeze, is a very real phenomenon on and offline. Word of mouth, viral, search, social networks all serve to propel a message.
That said the message may never be seen in the first place without good use of paid for media, including seeding. Everything must work in harmony. And to that end if at the birth of any campaign, the media folk are around the table, next to the creative and production folk. If they are aligned or even better, deeply in love, then the campaign that is built, particularly if it is online-centric, is likely to be fundamentally different in the first place.
One major company we work with lives by an equation that if production dollars = X, then media dollars = X*4. And they work it the other way as well.
We say that if project budget = X, then we don’t give a monkeys how it is divied up as long as everything feeds each other, that the basics e.g search, are got right at the outset. That paid for media activity is integral to the strategy. That the online advertising that is created is a structural part of the campaign, not just an advert for it. And that somebody somewhere asks how the campaign and all the expensive assets that were created for it will live on once the media budget has run out. And that somebody has worked out the answer!
Paid for media will always be the invaluable catalyst to any campaign but now it also needs to be the elephant at the table, not hovering at the back of the room, influencing the strategy as it is devised. Time to leave the office at the end of the corridor to HR.
Filed by sam.brownfield on October 1st, 2009 under Rant or Rave? | Comment now »
I Know What I Did This Summer
Well, that’s all folks. Another summer has come and gone and here in the UK it’s time for woolly lunches and roasted jumpers again.
I spent the first part of the summer in the super-humid city of Crockett and Tubbs, reviewing one of our major clients proposed, massive digital spend with their agencies across Latin America for 2010. Can’t say anything about it obviously, but in the words of one of my kids favourite programmes “we all feel better for that!”
Then it was off for a nice long break in the South of France where I managed to keep my dongle bill under £100 and now it’s back to life, back to reality.
Back on Planet Blighty the head of online for one of the world’s most loved retailers said to me yesterday “we’re all feeling a bit battered around here as everyone is trying to own multi-channel”. And I think that probably sums up the rest of the year for clients and agencies alike. Who owns it? What does it look like? And how much should it cost?
As the rain falls, skin flakes, credit card bills get paid off at a minimum and Christmas Dec’s at Harrods gets into full-swing, we of course shall be helping our clients answer those questions.
Filed by sam.brownfield on September 3rd, 2009 under Rant or Rave? | Comment now »
How marketers can recession-proof their jobs
LONDON – In one of his most withering attacks on Gordon Brown, in 2006 David Cameron accused the then-Chancellor of being an ‘analogue politician in a digital age’, adding, ‘you are the past’.
click here to read more
Filed by sam.brownfield on July 14th, 2009 under Uncategorized | Comment now »
How SME’s can benefit from Digital Marketing in the recession
Filed by sam.brownfield on July 6th, 2009 under Uncategorized | Comment now »
Digital Cost Consultancy On Demand
We are pleased to announce our new On-Demand Digital Cost Consultancy Service. As you may know we’ve been providing digital cost-consultancy for years, but this has generally taken the form of long-running contracts within established client relationships. We are now providing this service to anyone or any company big or small, who is looking for peace of mind as to whether what they have been quoted for any form of digital/online development is a fair price.
The service is totally confidential and secure, charged at 4% of the total value of the quote. And the first one is free!
We will turn around the “first-blush” analysis that we call “Red Flag” in 24hrs and further Blue Flag analysis dependent on provision of required data and background.
We have over £40m worth of real quotes on our database and a generation of experience that allows us to use this as a benchmarking tool but that only works with real industry insight and a clear perspective of what constitutes value online and what should be paid for it.
Our main website is being redeveloped at the moment, but there is more to read about it here or please just give us a call on 020 7520 9035.
Quotes can go up as well as down!!!
Filed by sam.brownfield on July 5th, 2009 under Rant or Rave? | Comment now »
The Ice Cream Men Cometh
A couple of weeks ago a friend and I met at the bar at The Gherkin.
Like myself, he is much more Soho than City, more online than on-a-ridiculous-bonus-scheme.
And sure enough we were surrounded by a braying sea of pinstripe in the heart of Insurance-Land. My friend was wearing a light-tan jacket, white shirt, blue jeans and brown shoes. And err….so was I. Looking like a pair of ice cream salesman at a funeral, we stood at the bar marveling at the fact that each and everyone of the league of extraordinary blue-suited gentleman would pay for his drinks by card, whether it was for one pint or a round of six. Thus making the process of getting a drink as time efficient as amateur chop-stick night.
Now, here I sit on the 8.17 from Basingstoke and sitting opposite me is a chap wearing a light-tan jacket, white shirt, blue jeans and err…brown shoes. If it weren’t for the fact that he’s read The Daily Mail cover to cover I’d say media was his game. If you walk around Soho in the sun today, which I highly recommend, you will see, among many much more attractive sights, lots more middle aged media-folk in the identical get-up.
Just don’t ask to by an ice cream from them.
Note to self: stop taking pictures of strange ice-cream salesman. The wife will get concerned.
Filed by sam.brownfield on June 25th, 2009 under Rant or Rave? | 1 Comment »
Where Digital Agencies May Fall Flat
A thought from 2007 from Adliterate.com, that is still just as relevant today:
Filed by sam.brownfield on June 22nd, 2009 under Rant or Rave? | Comment now »
The Network – Is Resistance Useless?
First it was Phorm and this weeks it’s Phorm by another name much more suited to a John Grisham novel – The Network. Scareeeee!
This is Logica’s new intelligence gathering platform that tracks you via your mobile. And because we take our mobiles with us everywhere as opposed to our PC’s which we leave behind when we step out, according to the Sunday Times article, The Network will “create a crucial bridge between the virtual world and the real world”.
By following our every move and developing profiles and patterns The Network, an opt-in service, will send us vouchers as we near shops we like, alert us to friends in the vicinity, inform us if we’ve left the gas on or if we’ve got loo roll stuck to our heels.
Responses to the Sunday Times article online are predictably derogatory and Orwellian in nature and on one-level I have to agree. It is scary. However, it really is too late. We are already on a thousand databases and filmed everywhere we go. There is no stopping the proliferation of computerisation of life and everything in it.
I am neither a apologist or a surrendering, but I do know for a fact that by the time my (3 year old) son is twenty in the world he will live in all the marketing he sees and media he consumes will be highly tailored to his every peculiar passion. And that we have to accept. It is however, the misuse of this information by the authorities that must be protected against and although it will be nearly impossible to decipher between the two, the first is inevitable and the second is…..oh heck, inevitable.
Filed by sam.brownfield on June 22nd, 2009 under Uncategorized | Comment now »
Extranet = Cautious Fisherman?
Got a call from the Campaign for Real English yesterday complimenting me on my digital jargon buster. How nice!
