On demand is moving

My friends have advised me that On Demand needs a new home so now please head to http://robnorman.wordpress.com

Shooting up at the ball game

The Mitchell report condemns the players of Major League Baseball but the shame should be shared by the administrators, owners and managers. The scale of the wrongdoing is such that most involved were cheats, fools or collaborators.

There is no way the records can be wiped and history re-written. The answer is simple. From Opening Day 2008 MLB should publish its banned substance list, introduce frequent and random testing and punish transgressors with immediate life bans for the players and an extra game in the lost column for the teams.

Why is this the answer? Simple, it costs the cheats and their employers money.

For the record Mr Bonds stood at the plate just 8 times when Mr Clemens was on the mound. In the juiciest of contests Mr Bonds struck out twice, was walked five times and hit by a pitch once. It is unlikely that this record will need revising in the future.

Well that's nice

One of our agencies was named Interactive Agency of the Year today and another as the runner-up. That's a good thing.

The question is why?

For the most part 'of the year' awards are a measure of momentum. A good run of new business and higher profile campaigns from September through Novmember helps a lot as it puts you front and center in the judging season. In fact those three months are probably worth double the identical performance in the quarter from January to March.

The most important thing to realise if you win is that expectations of your ability to deliver grow and it's really easy to slip from the top of the mountain. Also your staff become targets for your competitors so you have to do everything humanly possible to retain them.

In many ways being average is easier but if you were forced to choose.............

Britain annexes Alaska

Mike Gravel. He's our guy. An online 'match your ideas with a candidate' servive reveals the Democratic Senator for Alaska as the number 1 choice for ever Brit I know that has taken part. Broadly speaking Gravel is green, pro choice, anti death penalty and anti-war.

This much we know...........Gravel has an Alaskan snowaballs chance in hell of getting elected and that Brits (or at least my friends) are by American standards the most blood soaked of bleeding heart liberals.

Go Mike.

Tears for Sears

Before I go on I need to point out that my company used to be a supplier to Sears but was fired from its duties in the last year.

Yesterday, unconnected with the above, the company announced a 99% fall in earnings but more disturbingly an approximate fall of 5% in sales in stores that had been trading a year or more.

Sears is in an uncomfortable place. It means little to its customers, it lacks the price story of Wal Mart or the style story of Target. It means little to its staff beyond the check and appears to have lost any of the sense of pride in  its endeavors that seem to characterize good businesses.

The truth of it is that restoring a retail business to health requires the right merchandise, the right sourcing and logistics, the right environment and the right attitude among all the people the customer faces.

You save money and create efficiencies through the prism of these needs as doing it any other way is merely akin to peeling a bad onion. By and large they don't get any better the more you peel.

Sears retail estate is in pretty poor shape and there are clearly limbs that need lopping from the tree and others that  require nurturing in a somewhat intense fashion.

One problem maybe the ownership. Sears is controlled by people with heritage in hedge funds who, as a group,  prefer the notion of 'strip and spruce' to that of planting seeds and encouraging growth. Sears like many iconic businesses before it will discover it has no inalienable right to exist. It does have the 'infrastructure impact' that demands airlines are saved nor the localized and massive economic impact of the auto business. It's said that many newer mall owners don't want Sears as an anchor and if that's true the writing may be on the wall.

To survive Sears needs to spend on its estate, its merchandising and its people first. Efficiencies only benefit businesses that actually exist. 

The launch of the new IAB web site

The IAB was kind enough to publish this today:

Despite the sweaty palms and the pacing up and down, it’s a pleasure to be here in the delivery room to witness the birth of the IAB’s new Web site. Randy will make for a wonderful father and we should look forward to buying him a cigar to celebrate. However wherever we encounter joy, fear is never far away. I rather wonder though if it is not being born into a difficult world, one in which it, like other non-commerce web sites might be increasingly seen as an anachronism in the wider world of interactive consumer communications.

It’s a mission thing. The IAB seeks to assist our craft, and historically at least its mission has been‘to organize the industry to set standards and guidelines that make interactive an easier medium for agencies and marketers to buy and capture value.’

The impending challenge arises from the very concept of seeking rules, standards and conventions in a world which only exists because smart folks called Berners-Lee (WWW GUI), Bezos (Amazon), Yang (Yahoo!), Whitman (EBay), Brin (Google), Newmark (Craigslist), Ferber (Ad.com), Friis (Joost) and Zuckerberg (Facebook) among many others showed a total disregard for rules, standards and conventions in creating the most powerful communications platforms of our generation. Their mission was in so many ways similar to the IAB’s but they chose to represent the needs of a very different constituency, they organized the channel to make interactive an easier medium for consumers , developers and sellers to use and capture value.

In doing this they proceeded without regard to our business models and took a bet on the possibility that revenue would accrue as a consequence of usage and that said revenue could come from our customers and their consumers in some unspecified way other than a general sense of convenience and usefulness.

The result has been a significant challenge to the hegemony of many of our businesses and why should we be surprised because it’s not just agencies and publishers that have felt the sting of the new. New businesses everywhere have been created by the Internet and its applications that share some key characteristics that their forebears have difficulty in replicating. It’s rather like asking someone for driving directions and getting the answer, “I wouldn’t start from here.”
The key characteristics are low cost bases allowed by minimal production and distribution infrastructure, the creation of non-physical goods and services and the propagation of advertising inventory at something approaching zero marginal cost. Contrast that with the organization of TV networks, newspaper publishers, ad agency networks, the phone companies and Yellow Pages and for that matter the United States Postal Service itself.

Part of our challenge is that we as a collective have tried to bend the interactive space to our will principally by attempting to apply familiar paradigms to a new and unfamiliar space. We have even tried hard to apply our language in ways that don’t recognize the real nature of the beast. Of all these references the most common and misplaced is our insistence on referring to the web as a medium (and by turn a line item on a media plan) when at the very least it is a channel and by any reasonable analysis it is, prosaically, a platform and, perhaps more colorfully, a parallel universe.

The notion of a parallel universe is easily explained when we try and think of any human activity beyond the strictly biological that cannot be replicated online through the facility of the Internet protocol. To save you pondering that for too long restrict it to the functions of marketing communications. All of advertising, direct marketing, sales, promotions, sponsorship, PR, cause marketing, event marketing and consumer research thrive in this environment which in itself warns against a mindset that seeks to find narrow and, therefore, controllable definitions that only fits the language of media planner and publisher.

Back to the role of the IAB. We did not and will not gain control of how many characters are allowable in a search listing, we won’t and can’t gain control of applications developed for the increasingly open platforms of Facebook and Myspace. Google and Joost will make their own minds up about ad formats for Youtube and IPTV. Even ABC developed its own ad model and format for its full episode player. For everything we know about ads do we really understand applications?

This implies a triumph of innovation over regulation and through hooded and trepidatious eye-lids a triumph of chaos over standards. It further implies, assuming an irreversible tide, that what we really need is a combination of imagination and production efficiency that allows marketers, their agencies and publishers to develop truly valuable (and thereby compelling) communication applications that create value through the dual ability to increase the potential of changing hearts and minds and simultaneously reducing the costs of goods sold.

In this last point lies what may be the future of the IAB. In the channel or universe suggested here the key challenge for marketers is developing the measures of effectiveness and the understanding of the formats and processes that drive that effect. To be clear this is the measure of marketing’s effect on metrics like awareness and attitudes rather than the internal measures of media like reach and frequency and ways of counting. It’s not that these don’t have importance rather that they are not in and off themselves a reason for being.

The IAB stands at the threshold of a tremendous opportunity and possibly of a new mission:
“To assist brand owners, their agencies, content owners and distributors in understanding and measuring the effect of communications delivered through addressable platforms and to monitor and report on user interaction with evolving communication models.”

We have the community to achieve this, yet so far it’s close but no cigar.

Teenage sex and mobile marketing; 1967 and all that

The summer of love was the summer of liberation when it became commonplace to do what you had only talked about previously. 2008 just might be the year when the same is true of mobile marketing and advertising.

So far the category has been held back by the triple play of limited bandwidth, ludicrous data pricing and handsets that just were not up to the job. 2008 will see a continued decline in cost and , among other things, the arrival of the 3G I Phone.

This combination of events finally creates the context that makes markets. Critically the device means that messaging and content can evolve in such a way that stories can be told within compelling content wrappers and these stories can be enhanced by the unique place based interactions that mobility allows.

Naturally all this comes with a warning. Firstly, the best looking kids get laid first, not everything has the charm of the I Phone. Second, it behoves us to remember that just because we can does not mean we should and that a combination of abstinence and protection is never a bad idea.

Recession update

My wife's uncle has many sage like qualities. He made a very good living for many years as a technical analyst and gave me the only piece of financial advice I can remember, a simple three point list:

1. Stocks go up


2. Not all stocks go up all the time


3. If you have to look at the prices every day you can't afford it

He offers the following grain of hope about the impending slump. "All previous bull markets have ended when almost everyone said they would last forever. This time everyone thinks it's all over so maybe they will be just as wrong this time."

Let's hope he is right. Whatever happens buy his new book from amazon.co.uk

Did Macy's own the Koons?

The Macy's Thanksgiving  Day Parade is a wonder. It's kitsch, populist, perfectly choreographed and open to all. 'All' includes a million or so New Yorkers, 50 million TV viewers and and floats and inflatables as diverse as Ronald McDonald, Dolly Parton (!) and a Jeff Koons silver bunny alongside the pink Energizer bunny. This is to say nothing of 'pa's' from the casts of Legally Blonde, Xanadu, Mary Poppins and Young Frankenstein.

This begs an interesting question. Given that Koons this month became the world's most expensive living artist (at $25 million) did Macy's have the foresight to acquire an ownership interest in the bunny?

The Golden Generation

The ambitious soubriquet conferred on England's current crop of soccer players (Beckham et al) which once again proves that little that blusters is gold. For most teams Israel's unlikely conquest of Russia would have been a lifeline. For England merely a rope with which to hang themselves.

Tomorrow the tabloids will savage their erstwhile heroes with the same blithe venom that kings beheaded their fools 500 years ago. The hapless manager will be vilified eased only by the breathtaking golden parachute that rewards failure. Months will pass 'til the next poor sap takes the job based on the joint criteria of 'plausible enough to appoint, stupid enough to accept'.

English soccer is OK, the circus that surrounds it is quite disgusting. Football maybe going home, but not to England.

The only way is down

This weekend four stories led the UK papers:

1. The depth of the sub-prime mortgage crisis
2. Hyper-inflation of web 2.0 valuations
3. 'Insane' prices in a contemporary art market being driven through the roof by dealers buying the work of their own artists.
4. The celebration of Israel in the English press albeit only as a result of their soccer team doing England a favor.
   

It all adds up to a recession so it's time to get smart, seek out value over hype, and look for every opportunity to tidy the house for the ride. Good luck everyone

What is a Clomplier?

Clomplier : noun

A company which in its various guises is a client (cl), competitor (omp), and supplier (lier) to another company.

Usage: Microsoft is a client of WPP as we perform services for them, they are a competitor as AvenueA / Razorfish buys media and creates communication, they are a supplier as we are a customer of Atlas.

Google Masseuse makes millions - is this the ultimate 'happy ending'?

The NY Times ran a story about a newly retired house masseuse at Google who by virtue of her status as an early employee racked up multi millions in stock. God bless her. It's interesting however that the corporate world bifurcates into those companies that enrich employees and stockholders through capital appreciation and those that enrich shareholders through the payment of dividends.

Google remains a smallish player in the great scheme of corporate earnings and the time will come when it needs to reward a massively larger shareholder base with a small share of those earnings. It may be interesting to follow that transition.

The Language of Sports part 2, Boxing and Horse racing

And in second and third place after baseball..... Boxing Below the belt	Horse racing Down the stretch
Blow by blow	Each way bet
Fight to the finish	Falling at the last or the first (fence)
Going the distance	First past the post
In your corner	Home stretch
Knock out	Hot favorite
Knock out punch	Long odds
Left / right hook	Long shot
Low blow	Neck and neck
On the canvas	Odds on
On the ropes	Photo finish
Out for the count	Rank outsider
Ring rusty	Slow out of the gates
Sucker punch	Trifecta
Throw in the towel	Two horse race
Uppercut Saved by the bell Toe to toe	Crack the whip Pipped at the post

The sport language list: Part 1 Baseball

As predicted baseball seems to be our winner with 27 out 113 credible contributions.

Simple rules:

1. Add to the list
2. Argue for the entry to be moved to another sport or the general category

Here is the list:

Bottom of the ninth

Bush league

Curve ball

Designated hitter

Double header

Double play

Double switch

Ducks on the pond

Getting to 1st base (or second or third)

Grand Slam

Hit it out of the park

Home run

In the ballpark

Major league

Minor league

On deck

Out of left field

Pinch hitter

Play in the big leagues Screwball

Setting the table

Squeeze play

Step up to the plate

Strike out

Three strikes and out

Touching base

Triple play

Way off base

That old Facebook thing again

I have run into a number of Facebook execs since my last post. They remain convinced that their integrity is not challenged by the model and that previous life changers such as opening up beyond the college community and the development of mini feed looked threatening but ended up being embraced.

My own view remains that this is very very different and creating the social shill on the back of very personal data creates a benefit to Facebook ludicrously out of proportion to the benefit to the community.

Facebook Social Ads - Be careful what you wish for

Unimpeachably brilliant; the application of social networking principles to advertising. Let brands make friends, let the friends make more friends. Let people share what they buy with their friends who will buy more. Target your advertising against the declared interests of members.

What could be better unless......

1. The clutter on everyone's home page becomes impenetrable
   
2. If people who gave up information for the use of their friends maybe don't like it being used by advertisers
3. If those who opt in to allow others to see their purchases of music, sneakers and cosmetics should just maybe slip up and buy a porn film that now everyone will know about

Once again we have a zero wastage in advertising headline, once again we have the death of traditional advertising obits ready to run. Not so fast, what we do have is a massive challenge in reputation management and just one more destination to deal with in terms of driving the traffic with messaging that shapes opinion.

There is no doubt that advertisers will rush into the space but there needs to be some really smart thinking about how to harvest the eggs without killing the Golden Goose.

Not everyone agrees, see the AdAge article here

Open Social - the new tipping point

The Google / MySpace Open Social announcement means that applications designed for Facebook and distributed across its network will soon, with tweaks, work across almost all social networking applications.

For advertisers this is both intriguing and scary. Intriguing because you get to attach commercial messaging to stuff you can be almost certain is being used; scary because the demands on relevance go sky high.

I suspect this will be a truly disruptive event as it is possible that applications will somehow become a really major component of the digital experience and require a really significant adjustment for marketers.

It's the notes you leave out - The Police at MSG

Halloween at the Garden. Very disappointing. About 30 years ago Buddy Rich the greatest jazz drummer of his time made a rock album. Soon after he was on a chat show with Ginger Baker, the greatest rock drummer of his (or any other?) generation.

Baker told Rich that the notes you leave out are as important as the ones you put in implying that rock and roll and over-elaboration don't mix.

The Police over-elaborated everything last night and in so doing killed the 'geordie reggae' meets rock' that made them what they were.

Less is more.

Future of Business Media Conference

Having bored a few people witless at this event someone made a film......... click to view it

The sweet smell of the pitch

Another day, another dollar. Pitch time in 40 minutes. I like this one because it connects the new and the old. This client has a multi-generation media franchise with a particular media segment which with the odd exception has abjectly failed in evolving in the digital world.

We are going to tell them how to make that happen and their prize will be clear leadership in the category achieved by shaping it to their will, to the benefit of the consumer, their media partners and themselves. How can that be a bad thing.

Guest contribution from Randy Rothenberg of the IAB

Randy posted this excellent and as always insightful comment on my Facebook piece. Thanks so much!

I herewith support Rob's blog -- in word and deed! I want to throw in some wild cards, though. The analysis assumes all viewership of Facebook ads will be by Facebook members on Facebook. But two phenomena could upend this: syndication (the intentional placement of content, including advertising, in multiple venues); and "decontextualization" (the extraction of content from its primary venue into multiple venues). Syndication is primarily associated these days with networks, while decontextualization is associated with widgets.In other words, Facebook content (ads included) won't only be seen on Facebook (and the same with other content-hosting sites). If you accept that premise, you also have to accept a corollary: there will be different pricing schemes, based on context. On average, Rob's math may still work out -- although I'd be very cautious about extrapolating from today's CPM's to future pricing schemes, especially as consumers become habituated to some sites and those sites, in turn, are able to charge increasing environmental premiums.

Red Sox Nation

Boston win the Series. It's a shame the Rockies did not show up and the contrast between the most exciting regular season ever and the damp squib of the Fall Classic could not be more acute. The last Series of equal torpor was the Sox 4-0 blow out of the Cardinals in 2004, but here's the thing. If you are a Boston fan 4-0 is EXACTLY what you want. All the tension of being a fan all your life is quite enough thanks.

Extraordinarily dumb

The Giants played the Dolphins at Wembley today. It rained, the ball was wet, the grass was wet. It happens. At half time the experts opined that the relative shortness of the grass was a problem and offered the following insight.

"Over there they make the field for 165 pound soccer players like Beckham. These two teams have over 30 guys weighing more than 300 pounds."

Why didn't I think of that. For any who missed it the Giants won 13-10.

Are you worth $300 and if so for how long?

Microsoft's investment in Facebook (the Seinfeld of the digiverse) works out at $300 per user. This is an interesting number and is helpful in so far as it might inform us non-corporate finance types of where the real value lies. Everyone figures that the value will be derived from advertising revenue so let's do some sums.

Video ads in social networks are impossible to sell at more than a $10 CPM (cost per one thousand impressions) on that basis $300 will buy the advertiser the eyeballs (if not the attention) of 30,000 individuals so do the math...........

If there are 50 million users of Facebook it would (in theory at least) cost $500,000 to reach each of them once with video and MUCH less than that in other formats. The deal values the business at $15 billion so each user would have to be exposed to video advertising 30,000 times each to generate that number in cash.

The reality is that the real number as pricing trends downwards is probably 100,000 ad exposures per visitor ignoring all operating costs of the business. So if you take your community membership seriously you are kindly requested to watch at least one ad on Facebook every day for the next 274 years.

We can conclude from this that Mark Zuckerberg really is just as clever as he seems.

Excellent guest contribution from Randy Levine!!

Randy offers this exquisite snippet from the world's leading exporter of democracy........

Dolphins LB Channing Crowder, who appears likely to start in the middle Sunday against the Giants with Zach Thomas ailing, says he didn't know until Tuesday that people in London speak English.
"I couldn’t find London on a map if they didn’t have the names of the countries," he said. "I swear to God. I don’t know what nothing is. I know Italy looks like a boot. I know London Fletcher. We did a football camp together. So I know him. That’s the closest thing I know to London. He’s black, so I’m sure he’s not from London. I’m sure that’s a coincidental name."

What does winning mean?

One of our companies won a very big pitch today. The impact on the business is seismic; organisationally, financially and emotionally. It represents validation of the people and the years of preparing themselves to be able to deliver such an outcome.

For the CEO who was massively invested in the relationship, for his team that had sweat blood on part of the assignment over a period of years the outcome is particularly special and one truly hopes that they get to enjoy the thrill of victory.

For the rest of us who showed up to the dance we have a lot to learn and that will be truly humbling.

Guest columnist - Adam Samuel on the World Series

I possibly did not mention that Adam is a die hard Red Sox fan. I assume this is completely normal for middle aged Jewish men from North London.........Here is his take on the "Fall Classic" which starts tonight. Let's call this part 1 as his idea of 100 words and mine are not quite the same!

"The Red Sox have the class, the payroll and the stats. The Rockies have the grit and the confidence of the extraordinary run into and through the play offs and their defence is as good as any in history with no weak spots. It could make for a compelling World Series or the Red Sox could just roll over the Rox like David Ortiz smothering David Eckstein.

Boston had the best pitching, the third best offence and defence in the Majors not to mention (with the Indians) the best record in baseball. The team is balanced and powerful in most of the right places and yet.....

More from the Medialab

http://media.mit.edu If you had visited the Medialab at MIT a few years ago the experience would have had a 'Jetsons like' quality in that their work would have felt very far in the future. Now that the world operates on 'Google time' that is no longer the case.

This has interesting implications; as the time horizons for developing and distributing applications shorten and the number of developers grows because of the low price and free availability of processing power you can't help wondering if the market and the population at large has sufficiently developed coping mechanisms.

I suspect the answer is that the population has and the market has not. It is only businesses and marketers that require scale, the consumer only needs to know that something is available and that it has utility. It is no longer the case of 'I can't buy a fax machine until lots of other people have one', rather the interoperability and sociability of open based web systems mean that a single user can adopt something and gain utility from its usage in the knowledge that the internet protocol offers all the worm holes to the world that you could possibly need.

The consequence of this for advertisers is that we need to look for behaviors across platforms and technologies and achieve the heady notion of aggregated individualism. More on that later.

Spatial and sociable

I have seen the future. I was lucky enough to spend a day at the MIT Medialab courtesy of Time Inc. The IQ per head is somewhat intimidating but I think they slowed down just enough to let us keep up. It's hard to draw a pithy conclusion other than to say there were some general themes that will effect the next generation of communications. I would summarize as follows:

Right now most web experiences are linear, two dimensional and limited in their ability to respond to our behavior through learning. Also most interfaces to things interactive tend to be mouse (in whatever form) to screen.

Much of the Medialab's work is in breaking these conventions; the development of intelligent fabrics and spaces; three dimensional and spatial representations of data and content and applications that learn from the inputs of users and the people with whom they associate.

You can't help feeling that they are working in the terrritory of 'nearly now' and that we need to apply the same kind of thinking to communication applications.

England 6 South Africa 15

Integrity, effort but in the end defeat. We only lost the match but gained in every other department.

Showtime

3pm NY, October 20 2007. England attempt the impossible task of becoming the first country to retain the Rugby World Cup. This cannot be done, there is no way at all that we will beat the mighty South Africans, they have too much power, too much skill and too much belief. Issue settled. The result from the last encounter is on the shirt.

But on the other hand......some of us remember the night of February 11th 1990 when James "Buster" Douglas beat Mike Tyson. In relative terms Tyson was better than South Africa and England better than Douglas.

The Language of Sports (Update)

The WIKI WORKI. Thanks for all your help. We are up to 99 credible entries and as predicted baseball leads the way with 23 , followed by horse racing with 15 and boxing with 14.
There must be more - I will publish the whole list soon.

Some people are on the pitch.......

They think it's all over.......it is now.

What a week. The work thing is done, the pitch delivered, the support team (bless them one and all) are clearing the detritus of six weeks effort, the pitch team just finding time to exhale and get on with the day job.

Now the wait; did we answer the question? Did we leave anything on the table? What did the other guys do?

Soon enough we will know, you can only hope the crieria for the decision match the content of the brief as we are not the world's best double guessers!

Boo hoo Yahoo?

Yahoo! announced their earnings yesterday and after a few grubby quarters gave the Street some news it liked. Apparently Sue Decker laughed which she must have enjoyed.
This could be a breakthrough moment for Yahoo! which until now has really been an old media company relying on monetizing display ad inventory for its earnings. Now it looks like it wants to be a new media company:

• creating inventory through collaboration and open platforms rather than publishing
• leveraging search as a behavior rather than as an excuse for publishing a directory
• recognizing the value of the interconnected data it collects

Given that the industry would never have developed at the speed it has without Yahoo! we can only wish them well.

Guest post - The sports maven speaks

From Adam Samuel:

Just come back from Lausanne to find that my video failed to record a certain Rugby match. It's tough providing the necessary analysis on the basis of highlight reels. The French defence was clearly at fault for the Lewsey try. A lack of Pallister/Bruce - esque attacking of the ball going on on the part of Traille. The high tackle on Robinson was definitely high. More to the point, perhaps, conceding one try in two games will help a great deal. Has our defence been that good?
Anyway, happily, the final is a Saturday night here. So, I have no excuse. My concern is that with the big South African pack, I cannot see where our advantage lies. I always suspected that we could beat both Australia and France upfront. I think that we'll have to handle the South Africans a little differently.
One thing that is apparent is that all the plaudits for Brian Ashton were right. It's one thing to coach the best team in the world to the World Cup Final (2003) but the sixth best (NZ, SA, Australia, France, Ireland in that order were probably regarded as better at the start) is a bit special.
Anyway, on Saturday, I'll be missing you horribly and thinking of trudging through the rain four years ago and trying not to soak Bishop while removing my layers of waterproof clothing. Actually, fancy a trip to London?
More seriously, I subscribe the Mike Brearley Headingley 1981 fourth inning approach which accepts the likelihood of defeat but the possibility of victory. South Africa look the better side from what I've seen but if you can stop the other side scoring, interesting things begin to happen.

Life's a pitch

It's a a big week here in sight of the Alamo. Lots of people under lots of pressure and a sense that we are at a tipping point in the business at large coupled with a fear that climbing to that point remains a challenge.

The challenge is that traditional media drives a lot of NOW business goals but that the really key consumers who dictate the long term health of our customer's business are poorly served by it. In order to stake our claim in the new world means diverting money and effort from now til then but quarterly reporting and the impact on stock prices and C Suite measurement are a big barrier to bold steps.

This means that recommending the right thing that builds long term shareholder value is often the wrong thing for the win tomorrow. It also means that we hold our own development in check and compromise our own long term value.

Maybe this week is the week that our clients and us break free. If that's true the rewards will be great all round.

Content is king

The only way I could see the England vs France rugby match on Saturday was by paying $14.99 to Setanta to watch via a DSL connection on this laptop. The picture was poor, it froze at least 10 times during the match albeit not at crucial moments yet it was the best $14.99 I have ever spent.

This simply proves that the value of the content can be a decisive factor that overrides every other consideration. Would that there were more content like it.

Ooh La La

Ce n'est pas possible. Les Ros Bis sont magnifique.

Next Saturday, the World Cup again? Perchance to dream.

If you want to build a business by growing revenue hire marketing people. If not.........

As the march of private equity through retail and automotive continues it begs the question of what it means for marketers. Marketers by and large are top line folks in that growing revenue by increasing demand is what they do. So here's the issue. Not so many private equity folks have a great track record of creating value through increasing demand and revenue. They are jolly good at driving profits through supply chain management and pretty good at doing it by reducing costs. Of course the end game tends to be a sale to the trade or the markets of the new slimmed down, half the calories version at a big old price (yes of course I am jealous).

I am scratching my mouse wondering if there are more than a very few examples where PE and revenue growth are found in the same sentence. If I am right - you will tell me oherwise - where does marketing and its enabling services fit in the company newly yanked off the Dow? My slightly worried conclusion is that marketing under PE rules must be like doing triage in a field hospital. Stabilise the wound so the patient survives long enough to beome someone elses problem! Happily however PE folks do pay their marketers well.

Technorati

Technorati Profile

The advertising contract

Advertising involves a largely covert contract between consumer and publisher. The former allows the latter to intersperse its content with advertising so that the content is consumed free. This applies in full to all non subscription TV and in part to every magazine and newspaper. The online ad model is identical and as the New York Times and Wall Street Journal take away their subscription access the model online is becoming as pure as TV.

TV's problem of course is ad avoidance, the dreaded DVR or even the humble remote mean that the consumer is welching on his end of the contract and the advertisers are not happy.

For a sniff of the future take a look at the full episode player on ABC.COM. Quite apart from the unimaginable beauty of the interface (created by friends of mine!!) and the riotous quality of Move Networks Player the contract is both overt and exquisite. You get a little painless ad break at the beginning and that's it; unless you choose to fast forward in which case you get a maximum of three thirty second ad breaks in the hour. Cutely a corner counter tells you just how much longer you have to endure unless you choose to spend a second or an age interacting with the ad itself and all that surrounds it before resuming viewing.

This is good on three accounts; the viewer gets limited amounts of advertising but no deluge, the advertisers get some exclusivity and the opportunity for real engagement, the media owner gets to sell a premium product for good money.

All good.

Martha Stewart - a life complete

If you guessed Martha led a full life in beatiful surroundings you would be right on both counts. She is a force of nature and encouragingly the word 'Living' is not just a brand but a way of life for her. Her contribution to improving quality of life goes way beyond table settings and great cake but to using her resources and connections with many that matter to make a real difference to people that need it. A great priviledge to meet her. In the unlikely event of reincarnation I will come back as one of her horses; their house is nicer than mine!

Hostess Gift - The answer

A pair of Japanese wooden handled garden shears in a holster that fits on a tool belt. Feel good about that! Thanks for your help!

New York and Lisbon

Are on the same latitude. Not remotely surprising in the summer, somewhat more so when the temperature dives between January and early March. Above all though New York is changed in character by rain. Our Avenues have deep cambers caused by the cut and cover subway construction (which also accounts for the booming noise in the city) and these create lake like conditions often 2 metres across at street corners. This demands the footwork of a dancer and the footwear of an angler. Shops fill with designer wellies, umberella sellers magically appear at every corner and just as quickly taxis disappear like vapour.

People say that the English are obsessed by the weather but I think the New Yorkers can give them a run for their money.

What do you take Martha Stewart as a hostess gift?

Imagine for a moment that Martha Stewart invited you for dinner. What would you take? Wine, flowers, chocolate? In the abstract this is only so interesting but as this is actually happening TOMORROW (Wednesday) advice would be much appreciated!

Head coach anyone?

Male, late 60's, seeks employment. Most recent role, manager of New York Yankees baseball team. Major achievements, 12 consecutive post seasons, 6 World Series appearances, 4 World Series wins. Used to dealing with talented but difficult employees and navigating relationships with challenging shareholders.

Alas Joe Torre, you picked the only sports franchise on the planet where not winning the whole thing every year is failure. Goodbye George Steinbrenner (the Boss way before Springsteen), hello Cooperstown and the Hall of Fame.

Social networking - playing the long game

How much of marketing is focused on what people might or should think five years from now? Not a whole lot I suspect as corporations focus on the next quarter and zero in on the last mile, the moment of truth and the shopper insights that inform those strategies. The rise of online marketing, the extraordinary progress of search and newer and quicker optimization tools merely fuels the thirst for now and the ability to squeeze the last drops out of the wet rag sometimes at the expense of the search for new supplies of water.

Social networks are a challenge for marketers (outside the entertainment sector) who are frustrated by a lack of 'RESULTS RIGHT NOW' outcomes compounded by a prevailing view that they are somehow important nonetheless.

Maybe the real answer lies in using the newest of all communication environments to play a much longer game and work to influence opinion among people who will be most economically active in the future.

So far we can speculate about about a few things that do and do not work. Collaborative tools are good, applications that let people do stuff are good; ads are not so good. So when you think about about a brand, a category or a business what applications might you create and share that will involve communities and encourage them to co-develop with you and consequently build a positive relationship that you might cash in some time in the future.

Sports and the language

Let's try a little 'crowd sourcing' exercise. The object is to build a database of the contributions of sport to the English language to see just how many there are and how many come from each sport. So as a starter here are a few from baseball which I think may be our eventual winner.

1. Hitting a home run
2. Strike out
3. Three strikes and you're out
4. Hit it out of the park
5. Way off base
6. Curve ball
7. Getting to first base (or second or third)
8. Squeeze play

You get the idea

Columbus Day

October 12th 1492. Columbus discovers North America by accident and de facto becomes the country's first recorded immigrant. He was the first of many and quite possibly the last one who thought more immigrants would be a good idea!

Adam Samuel - lawyer, sports maven

I take the libery of commenting on sport in this blog. I do it at my peril as my good friend Adam may just respond leaving me seeming ill informed or just plain ignorant. Clearly his contributions are a good thing so please do look out for them. Before you decide to correct him I offer one word of advice. Don't. He will be right you will be wrong.

NFL Sunday : The Jets and The Giants

What greater rivalry could there be in all of sport than the Jets and the Giants? The only cross town rivalry in the entire National Football League (let's ignore the 49ers / Raiders), a shared stadium and history on both sides. Yet in fact the rivalry probably would not rank in the top 50 of US sports. The Jets and the Giants play in neither the same division nor conference which means they can never play a winner takes all game unless by miracle they meet in the Superbowl itself. Actually they only get to play at all every fourth year which is barely enough to confer bragging rights.

For the record the Giants are at home today, both have had average to poor starts to the year, maybe just as well the game is not in NY at all. The stadium is in New Jersey. By the way the Giants won.

Oh me of little faith

England 12 , Australia 10. It beggars belief. I have never missed being in England as much as I do now simply to share the lake of beer that accompanies beating the Australians at anything. In Mrs. Thatcher's words.........Rejoice, Rejoice!

More surreal still is that France beat New Zealand (the best team in the world for 47 out of every 48 months) to set up a repeat of the 2003 semi-final next weekend.

Be sure of one thing; England CANNOT win this World Cup.

Two hours to go

England remain Rugby World Champions, for at least another two hours. In twenty minutes they start a game against Australia, the defeated finalists last time. This time almost no one thinks England have a chance. More later..................

Moving Picture - The Valley of Elah

Bleached out visually and emotionally the movie tells a story of how men can be destroyed by war even if they appear to survive the combat itself. It's a powerful anti-war comment, but I rather wonder about the anti-war movie that has not been made. This is the movie that examines just what kind of people encouraged by what kind of families and friends actually volunteer to fight in the wars of politicians?

America is not ready for that movie. Sentiment here (from New York liberals at least) can be summarised as 'Support our troops. Stop the war.' There are very few people that place the blame with the soldiers or even question their motivation. The centrepiece of the Valley of Elah was the murder of one soldier by one or more others; looked at another way it was about the murder of a drunken young man by other drunken young men - like that does not happen so often. The varnish of 'honor through service' might just be distorting our view of people who may have ended up doing the same thing without ever wearing a uniform.

A flat pitch

Agency pitches are remarkable things. Extraordinary resources are applied to deliver choreographed presentations that allow the people involved to stand out and achieve some lingering memory in the minds of the clients concerned.

There are relatively few binary measures in the process that allow the client to see if A is definitively better than B. I like to think (naively) that the process works something like this:

1. Select a short list. Dead easy There are 6 companies on the planet who can do the job, 3 of them work for competitors. The short list = 3.
2. Give each agency 100 credits.
3. Set them a series of tasks; 100 pages of detailed questions, a couple of 'chemistry meetings', a few dozen follow up questions, two or three follow up meetings, a social occasion, a financial proposal and assorted other bits inclding the all singing all dancing final.
4. Watch the agencies lose points throughout the process by not quite hitting it out of the park each and every time.
5. The agency still standing and with most points left wins.

This starts to sound like the World Series of Poker and it should. Similar combinations of skill, luck, oppostion weakness, and endurance are at play and in the end you count the chips.

This won't change in a hurry so no great insight there but there are three requests that seem reasonable.

1. Allocate allotted time for the process and pay for that time for no other reason than the agency has other clients (just like you) to serve and they need to fund that resource
2. Be nice and be decisive. If someone is losing points quickly push them out of the process quickly. No one wants to be the wounded animal dragging out its demise.
3. Finally be as clear as you can about the basis of the final decision, Is our office in Casablanca really important or is there (just maybe) something that matters more.

Rainy days and Mondays

Can always get you down even if it does not actually rain. Today has operated on the principle of inverse achievement. The harder you work at something the worse it becomes. This is a good time to start believing in miracles.

Do the math

In a career of over 4,000 innings pitched, Tom Glavine of the Mets conceded a run every 2 1/2 innings. Today was do our die. In one inning he gave up 7. Game over, season over and maybe career over. It's only a game Tom.

What did you do at the office today?

The CEO of Ford came to talk to us (100 colleagues) on Friday. First question...how did he have the time? If management is the art of simplification and alignment around goals they have found their guy. He is clearly totally committed to the task in hand and you rather get the feeling that if he can't do it then nobody can. The reason why he visited with us was, I think, to get a smell of belief. I hope he did.

Catastrophe

I said the other day that it would take a catastrophe for the Mets to miss the play-offs. Now it will take a miracle to make it.

Slouching towards October

Despite the Mets' best efforts at blowing the National League East Division Title only catastrophe sits between them and the post-season. Not that we should rule out such a catastrophe but here's hoping. The baseball plyoffs feel like something of a lottery to me. Last year St. Louis crept in and won the World Series; this year they are nowhere near even making the playoffs. Perhaps the very fact that a team can dominate a division with a 60/40 win / loss record defines a sport where anything can happen on the day and over a five or seven game series. So the conclusion is we might win it all....or we might not.

What a difference a week makes

The Mets win 3 in a row, the Phillies lose a game, the Jets and Giants win and even Tottenham get to draw (tie) at Bolton. England rugby beat Samoa. Rejoice, Rejoice. All remarkable stuff and dare we wish good portents for the week ahead.

Keeping your head above water

Data is intimidating; every record of every customer, of every transaction. Web sites are intimidating; the fluffy consumer front end all the way to the bowels of commerce at the other. Maybe it's this sense of enormity that drives people to rigid solutions and rules, to templates and formats and a world run by the keepers of the data and stewards of the web site rather than by the marketers who have to get some kind of action out of the consumer.

So perhaps the answer lies in thinking about parcels of data that float above or to the side of the behemoth. Parcels that represent samples that can me stimulated and measured and used as a proxy for the whole thing.

On the web side think of clouds that sit between the traffic drivers of search and online ads and that big 'ole web site; an airlock or safe house in which we can play, get to know and interact with our customers before passing them safely and accurately to their destination. Think of it is a really terrific call center or concierge service that understands what you want and the best way to get it to you.

Ever decreasing circles

This has little to do with anything but share my pain for a moment. I am a sports fan; specifically a fan of the Mets and the Jets, of Tottenham Hotspur, England cricket and rugby. In the last five days the Mets are 0 and 5, the Jets 0 and 2, Tottenham blew a 1-0 lead to go down 1-3 against Arsenal (THE rival), England cricket lost to South Africa and Australia and England rugby was murdered by South Africa. Fortunately I am a fan of Tiger Woods. Always good to have some security in a sub-prime world. Thanks for listenting.

Seismic moments? Update

So it is Andy Berndt from Ogilvy that is heading to Google. An entirely personable and very smart guy. Should be very interesting.

Seismic moments?

So the rumour is that Google has hired a vey high profile ad guy to run what might just be an ad agency inside Google. What does this mean? Well a lot of curiosity and no little trepidation in what used to be Masdison Avenue. There are a lot of people who think their lunch will be eaten by a company that has resources they can only imagine.

Are they right? Sure if they don't adapt. Advertising isn't dead, creativity is still magic and even humble media planning and buying cannot be reduced to an algorithm all the time and every time yet and yet...if we can't fix the production model on the one hand and the data model on the other we will lose share to those that can.

Google has a habit of shaking us awake. We should thank them as well as fear them.

Search and destroy? Redux

It seems the common good is alive and well. Everyone played nicely. We will do a good thing.

Search and destroy?

Off to the mid west. Should be interesting. Trying to persuade three fiercely independent and capable groups that together is better and that the notion of the common good actually exists. The good news is that all the parties are decent. This is unusual in itself. The bad news is that I cannot PROVE that I am right and desperately need them to believe that I am. Too often people try and find structural solutions to behavioral problems but on this occasion I really do think that the answer lies in the organization this time.

Even if this goes well there is a mountain to climb with other folks in the value chain but I think it's probbaly worth it.