Month: November 2009

The Apple iPhone, free with £30 of shopping

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Marco Bertozzi 26.11.09
OK it’s not that bad yet but its going that way. I have to admit I am undecided on how I feel about the way the iphone is moving. On the one hand I think that it is a great phone (in most areas) and should be available to all, on the other hand it feels as if the gloss is being rubbed off it.

Part of having an iphone was the wow factor, all those early adopters out there loved showing how the screen bent and zoomed and turned upside down etc, that was amazing at the time. Anyone who had an iphone early will have been centre of attention to the vast majority of people, if only through sheer curiosity to see this famous piece of kit. This video summed it up;

Now everywhere you look there is an iphone hanging off someone’s ear, all the other phone manufacturers have caught up in most of the technology capabilities and overtaken in some, it’s just not as interesting anymore. When the Mini launched everyone loved it but it lost something when Foxtons and now many others adopted it as their car of choice. Seeing an Iphone next to the carrots in Tescos does not feel right, where is the next level of exclusivity and novelty from them?

BMW, like them or loathe them understand this and have always brought out new cars regularly, its annoying if you buy one as it’s ‘an old shape’ very quickly, but they do it for a reason. It means those who want to pay for the latest can do and those who aspire to owning a BMW can get one second hand, BMW keep everyone happy. That said BMW were too successful and the roads are flooded with them, they are the equivalent of the iphone in Tescos.

I still love my iphone, it’s user interface and App store is still second to none but I do hope they bring out something else to wow us before that Apple gloss starts to fade.

I never thought I would say it but I am beginning to get envious of my wife’s Blackberry, now there is a company thats trying hard to bring the wow factor.

How will Ad agencies manage Ad exchanges?

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Marco Bertozzi: 18.11.09
I mentioned how important ad exchanges are becoming but not the difficulties they will bring both to sellers and buyers.

By some they are touted as an impression by impression targeting opportunity where at last you can optimise your ROI against a very specific audience, this may well be true. However to achieve this campaigns need to be managed day in day out, who will do this in an agency? It’s closer to running a search campaign than a display campaign but I can’t see the search teams running it, so that leaves the buying teams.

Buying teams don’t do what the search teams do and on the whole would rather not. Those guys tend to buy idea based campaigns, Ad exchange activity will need optimising, not weekly or twice weekly but hourly, the buying teams won’t do that, they have too much else to do.

I know that companies like google struggle with this, who are we talking to; buying, planner buyers, search teams, account teams, digital teams? Their problem gets worse when you add in video, with tv and digital departments grappling over who owns it. This is the fundamental issue agencies face, Damian Burns at a recent Monaco Media event challenged Nikki Mendonca on how an agency should adapt and I am not sure she really had an answer, it’s clearly still a difficult situation.

Let’s say we do sort all that out, the bigger issue remains that this all takes resource and therefore decent salary budgets. Digital media commissions have stayed relatively strong with many clients still paying 10+ percent but any decent sized account is now half that and below, where is the agency going to make money on these new time consuming approaches and that includes social media.

I hope that slowly agency payment methods evolve to one closer to paying for a premium service, monthly fees being a norm rather than an exception, even better monthly fees with a commission, I think these new channels will make agencies have to reevaluate how they charge and establish exactly who will do the work!

The new model agency

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Marco Bertozzi:11.11.09
Its starting, the momentum is gathering towards the true ‘new model agency’. First we had media agencies that were all in silos by department with TV being the dominate in most. Over time that has merged into cross media departments with TV, Press etc buyers all working together, makes me think of ZULU the film, closing ranks to protect themselves from the onslaught. Are we seeing the end of the buyer as we know it?

Digital has thrown everything up in the air and then on top of that technology has thrown digital up in the air and everyone is trying to cope, the one thing that is true though is that more and more technology will do the best job of ‘buying audiences’ as its becoming known. I have just come from an agency that was very commercially aware that low value, high volume accounts and the people who worked on them are not needed in central London, stick them somewhere cheaper was their idea. With agency margins being squeezed this can make a genuine difference.

Buying has that feeling about it, do media agencies really need 40-50 buyers, buying media that has already either been agreed in an overarching deal or is being supported by technology. The arrival of ad exchanges from Google, Right media and many others will change everything. You need to buy impression by impression, audience by audience and in real time, ‘paying’ the right price by impression millions of times an hour – no media buyer will do that.

The planning of TV, Press, digital or outdoor is all possible through technology so I suspect in five years time we are looking at media agencies that focus on strategy, some key trading heads to do the deals and a lorry load of computers. Agencies will be paid for adding value not buying media.

I will be interested to see which agency is brave enough to embrace this new model ahead of the pack and decide that things really can be done differently..lets see.

Fascinating battle of the boy with his finger in the dam and Open access

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Marco Bertozzi:11.09.09
What am I on about? News Corp is talking about a) charging for content and b) pulling it from Google. Many people have used the analogy of the little boy with his finger stuck in the dam to demonstrate that Murdoch can’t hold back the tide of open access of content. Actually if you read the story it makes the point that if you act quickly you can hold back a bigger disaster such as a dam breaking, everyone assumes the dam breaks..it doesnt.

Where does that leave Murduch? Has he acted quickly and everyone else will follow and before you know the tide of paid for content will be stopped, or is he just a little bit too late? That is now what everyone is waiting to find out but I do think that perhaps he should have stuck his finger in the dam about 8-10 years ago. The world has evolved and people are able to aggregate so much content that paying for it seems strange, albeit very fair.

People are also a little more fickle than in the past, often when searching for news online, its to fulfil an immediate thirst for information, I would be intrigued to see how many people when searching for news care whether they get it from Sky news, Telegraph, BBC or The Guardian. Take 911, the largest event in news for a lifetime, people immediately started to search for information, does Murdoch really not want to be found in those circumstances? I think the key take out for me is that in an age of open access and such volumes of available content available this decision seems to be moving against the tide.

The portal could be back..

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How on earth do you stay in touch with all of your communications? So whats normal nowadays? Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, your blog? News feeds from wired, trade news, world news etc etc. I think that the world is getting out of hand in terms of comms solutions.

How right then that AOL, Yahoo and more recently MSN are simplifying their pages and letting in the competition to allow us to connect to all of our accounts from one page. This would have been unthinkable a few years ago, when I was working on a film release the film maker had a promotion site made by Yahoo and therefore contained its logo, even this was not allowed on the MSN site at the time. How the world has changed, but it needs to!

The idea of a Portal is never more relevant, perhaps more relevant than when the portals genuinely ruled the digital waves. I could see these portals gaining back share with the advent of letting people add their own widgets. Yahoo / MSN and the like need to go even further down the road to the likes of netvibes and their many lookalikes

and allow absolutely all the links you could ever want on your page, become like them except you have content, news, entertainment etc. The Portal is back, lets hope they make them better than ever because all i know is I need one place to go to, not 5 or 6. On that point, I have to say that I am thoroughly disappointed with Linkedin external linking strategy, they have one of the poorest iphone applications, they have a useless netvibes widget – what are they doing, they are meant to about being a business network, they need to speed up this part of their developments..

Integrated, digital at the centre, agencies have changed, how do media owners respond?

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Just before the recession kicked off every article was about digital, within the agency world it was the key battle ground, who had more of it, was it integrated, who was pretending etc etc. The recession seemed to put pay to that for a while, everyone concentrating on survival. What the recession will have done in many agencies is allow them to make a lot of change very quickly, people are a lot more receptive to structural change when their jobs are at risk. The end result of that will be that agencies have perhaps now taken a bigger step forward in a shorter period of time than at any previous period of the past.

Most agency groups now have pulled together or bought up a vast array of digital properties and now the task is to link them all together and make them something that clients can genuinely buy into, thats the biggest task of all and there are definitely some struggles out there.

Likewise the media owners are having to adjust at the same pace, they have also battled with separate sales teams, on and offline, agency relationship managers, sponsorships and many other properties but to make them work the teams have to work together and present a coherent face to the marketplace.  Guardian teams have been well known to be struggling in this regard and have done for some time and perhaps this is now being reflected in the IPA Media Owner survey. The Telegraph made a very high profile office move and merged teams far more quickly and effectively and they seem to be benefitting from that move.  The thing that stands out for me at the more successful media properties is that they all have two common themes; the right people in the key jobs and a desire to completely reinvent. AOL was down on its knees but therefore had little to lose and have completely re-engineered themselves and came to market with clarity and ambition. Telegraph was a similar story in terms of their ambition to completely evolve.

There is a lesson in that and some agencies could also look at those examples and shake things up, there are many agencies that have the same people, in the same roles and in the same format. Look to the brave and reinvent your offer and be brave enough to change. Change is addictive, tough to start with but once you do it, you can make a real difference.