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.