Marco Bertozzi: 20.12.09
Only the other week I was writing about how Real Time search would impact a brand. I talked about the fact that real time negative PR would be presented on the first page of Google listings would make life difficult both for the company and for any attempts to carry out a PPC campaign alongside it.
Well Eurostar have done a brilliant job of bringing that to life for us over the last few days. Lets face it Eurostar has had a nightmare. Trains that are sensitive to the cold, people stranded, holidays and Christmas ruined, kids with no food, blacked out trains over night, it could not get any worse..or could it?
Yes it could if the company had no communications strategy in place, right from people on the ground to Twitter moderators or websites being updated frequently, they have broken every rule going, especially in the first day or so.
Twitter is filled to the brim with negative comments and no one has been in place to respond to them which just fuels the fire, how difficult is it? Answer a couple of questions, make an announcement or two. There is no excuse for how poor they have been. They do seem to have no paid for listings against the search term Eurostar tickets so someone remembered to pull all their advertising! Even here though, was there an opportunity to have put some notices of some sort? As it is a few random companies are wasting their budgets against paid for listings for the words Eurostar.
Marco Bertozzi 14.12.09
The new Google phone photos are now being leaked in every direction, there is a lot of discussion over what phone it actually is, the majority believe it to be an HTC.
The key things with this phone are:
1. It will be unlocked so open to all
2. It is Google born and bred software
It is meant to be very slick and better than the iPhone although time will tell! Click on photo below to see all the photos.
Marco Bertozzi 13.12.09
Well lets start with what Google says about its new search results, here is a video summing up the possibilities:
The summary of that provides these services:
• Ability to filter real-time results to only show updates from particular sources, such as Twitter, Friendfeed and others on new “Latest results” page;
• Latest results and new search options optimized for iPhone and Android devices “when you need them on the go, be it a quick glance at changing information like ski conditions or opening night chatter about a new movie — right when you’re in line to buy tickets”;
• “Hot topics” on Google Trends will now show most common topics being published to web in real-time.
SO what does that mean for advertisers and individuals?
There are two ways of looking at Real Time search. One is from the individual’s perspective and the other from an agency/advertiser’s.
An individual really just had the power put into their hands, an unbelievable position of prominence on the world’s most viewed ad placement. If you are unhappy you can make your point immediately. If you are raging at the latest piece of news, if a mouse just ran across your hotel room, whatever happens to you, you tweet or FB and its up and visible to all. It’s unbelievable, really.
Those tweeters and bloggers are now in a position to generate massive traffic for their sites or profiles, this will be the best thing ever for egomaniacs. It will of course also be amazingly useful. You are in a traffic jam and need to know what the hold up is, how is the weather in Balham right now, its all there, it will be so useful day-to-day. Of course its all there at the moment if you search on Twitter but I think this move will bring that knowledge to a far wider audience.
Part 2 however is much harder. If you are an advertiser and happily investing in PPC campaigns when suddenly your ad is now alongside someone who is destroying your brand or service, then you are going to have to come up with an active strategy. Areas such as Hotels, restaurants etc may have a nightmare if people do Tweet negatively about them while they are trying to buy ads encouraging them to book.
As an advertiser this will mean you have to consider a few actions;
1. Redouble your efforts to make sure your brand advertising is clear, eye-catching and able to draw people away before they start to soak up all the real-time results below which may not all be positive.
2. Advertisers will now be fighting over the top slots more fiercely so be prepared to invest further into the PPC budgets. You will not want your text ad half way down the page while some FF or Twitter updates are above you giving you what for!
3. If the reports are correct that only 26% of the top 500 superbrands seriously invest in Twitter then perhaps this move will spark them into action as they will need to have their own content in the real-time results as well as those of the users / customers / consumers. Thats probably a good thing as it will make more advertisers deal with social media, something that so many are still behind on.
Search systems which may only optimise a few times a day are also going to appear slow in comparision to these kind of results, at the moment as people monitor their search ROI it may be optimised infrequently, this will need to be accelerated. Bad real-time feeds may be ruining your PPC and you should know about it and react. It will make search a lot more labour intensive as if it needed to be anymore complicated.
So what do I think overall. Great for the individual, very useful, very informative. For the advertiser, well its going to need a lot more work and thought both in SEO, PPC and social strategies.
Marco Bertozzi 10.12.09
As we leave 2009 we start to see the endless list of predictions for 2010, some interesting, some very topline some very specific but all worth having a read if you want to see how 2010 is going to be shaped. It is only a selection, if you want to add yours then leave a comment at the end. I have researched a fair few of them and listed out the main issues for 2010.
As I am keen to make it clear that I have used other people’s musings I have listed them below for you to have a look through as well, but my suggestions may speed things up!
1. Status updates and Tweet burn out will result in a little more culling / blocking of ‘friends’, reducing the social element of social media.
2. Real time search, recently launched by Google will mean brands need to work much harder to stay on top of the sentiments being expressed around them. People will be able to complain in an instant and have it up on the web. It will also make SEO and PPC far more complicated and require very frequent reviews of price and position vs the content around it.
3. Facebook and direct Tweets will replace personal email as the preferred route to reach people.
4. Mobile commerce taking off through a more Apple App store approach to paying for goods, anyone who buys apps on the iphone knows just how easy it is to buy loads of things that you wouldn’t if you had to put your card in every time.
5. As many companies ban social media sites at work, the mobile will be the guilty pleasure and escape from work shackles.
6. Commercialisation of the Twitter audience, I am sure it will come with a vengeance and hopefully some innovative new ad approaches.
7. Less of a prediction, more of an interesting thing to watch, the battle of online news content, to pay for or not? My view is still an Ad funded model as the victor.
8. Convergeance of video and TV. youtube and Hulu and the like taking ever more film / TV content online.
9. The rise of commercial applications as a route to making the most of the social phenomenon where shouting at your audience while they are ‘hanging out’ does not work.
10. Media agencies making some genuinely large structural, technological and commercial changes to future proof themselves in a market where the 2% margin model does not pay.
Below are a few of the links, there are many more, would be great if you added your predictions in the comments section.
Yesterday saw a small reunion at The Dudley pub in Paddington. The Dudley was the spiritual drinking home of Zenith Media as it was. Yesterday some of its most loyal supporters returned to have a quick drink there before moving on to other Paddington favourite haunts.
The reminiscing and story telling was in full swing and it was a great day but left you realising how much media has changed from the days back in the shed @ Paddington. ZO is now all grown up with shiny offices on Charlotte St, along with many other agencies in the area, many of our group had left ZO and interestingly often from agency to media owner which shows how much the skills between agency and media owner are blurring as they become more and more strategic in their approach as well as more central to discussions with clients as clients look to involve content and conversation in their approach to reaching people.
All in all though, it was good to discuss some of the bigger issues which I would be prohibited from raising here but focused on JF and TS quite a bit and of course not to mention JH and KH.
Marco Bertozzi: 08.12.09
Bing is out there telling the world that they are reinventing search and we must all Bing. I can’t put my finger on it but the ads somehow dont seem right to me, is it because I am used to finding a search engine without being told about it? I guess Ask did a lot of advertising, but then I never used that site either.
But thats not why I am writing, Bing actually does do some very interesting things and I think has moved things on a bit, so it seems a little irrelevant that Google is now touting its fading in homepage, it made me think when I first saw it that they were having problems loading the page! I dont see it, even from a design perspective it fades in as soon as you do anything which is normally immediately, not sure how many people sit back and admire the page for too long, so what’s the point? I want to see some major improvements at Google that really create some buzz, maybe real time search will do that, although I will be interested to see how much babble that pulls up.
That said, can I ever see myself defaulting to Bing, not really, thats one habit that I would need rehab to get over.
Marco Bertozzi: 02.12.09
These ads have been suggested as the 10 best Ads of the decade in the Guardian, the Ads are brilliant and I wanted to have them all on one place and spread the question to others. Have a look at the Ads and comment as to which you think stand out as winners. I also leave us asking what the best digital ads would be?
Number 1: John West Salmon
Number 2: Levi’s Odyssey
Number 3: Honda Cog – a favourite?
Number 4:The John Smith Ads with Peter Kay
Number 5:Sony Bravia bouncing balls
Number 6: Rhythm of life Guiness
Number 7: Cadbury’s Gorilla Ad
Number 8: Skodia Fabia Original cake car
Number 9: PG Tips ‘The Return’
Number 10: T-Mobile Ad
Great Ads, great seeing them all together, I wonder how we would do identifying the best online Ads of the naughties – any suggestions?
Marco Bertozzi: 02.12.09
Good to see YouTube advertising in the Guardian and Metro, there was a time when executives in the company would rather be seen dead than advertising, let alone in press. Surely that would admit they need offline media to launch a new proposition.
I think actually what it shows is that planning how to reach an audience is more based on where they are likely to be found at any given touch point through the day as opposed to what is the channel of choice and or whether it would be seen as admitting defeat, it shows that regardless of your brand, whether it’s the most digital company in the world or not, you should use the right channels to reach your target audience.
The Ad itself now makes it feel like YouTube are really beginning to flex their muscles a little and take ownership of TV on the web away from all the hype surrounding Hulu. I am sure that just round the corner we will see some major film content and other TV company content. I still feel that they need to change the design a little, I know it’s a successful formula but if they really want to ad lots of great content I believe it should be presented in a more grown up setting. (Maybe I am getting old)
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.
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!
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