Remember this guy?It all started so well for himI mean, everybody knew he wasn’t a great communicator but he was a great man with a great mind
My enduring memory of him will be how he liked to talk about himself, how HE had ended boom and busthow he’d saved the world after it nearly went bustHe loved to talk about himself
Here he is talking about himself again
I guess the country’s most enduring memory of GB is this thoughThat bloody graphic!!<<transition>> I like that they rebranded it halfway through the recession – rebranding recession eh, I suppose it was one way of keeping a bad story fresh With all the bad news going around, job losses, budget deficits, public sector cuts one could be forgiven for thinking that there was no good news to be had at all.
No so actuallyIn fact those of us in the digital marketing business were sitting there with something of a smug look on our faces You see, for years leading up to the start of the recession in 2008, we’d all been revelling in predictions the demise of traditional media and traditional advertising. We’d all read the stories about how brands were going to shift theiir marketing budgets away from traditional media (press/tv/radio etc) to digital media but as the recession really began to bite, we began to see this happening. ************************************************At thst start of 2009, a YouGov poll predictedthat 42% of UK marketers foresaw their digital spend increasing. 21% said they would cut TV advertising, 26% print and newspaper spend, and 29% magazine advertising.Outdoor, radio and cinema advertising would fare no better, with 18% predicting budget cuts for outdoor and radio each, and 17% for cinema.The research firm’s assessment for 2009 is that “only the Internet would remain positive.” Online advertising is expected to grow 7% in the United States in 2009 and, by 2010, should make up 14% of overall ad spend.**************************************************Typifying the move from offline to online marketing spend is Electrolux. Whereas the company has been spending 80% of its £50/$73 Million pan-European marketing budget on TV and posters, in 2009 its investment in television will be slashed to less than 40% and outdoor to a maximum of 10%. Alexander Darwazeh, senior brand director for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, predicts that, while marketing budget will remain the same depending on market conditions, ”we’ll be moving aggressively out of broadcast and billboards and into customer relationship management, the internet and experiential.”**************************************************But this talk isn’t really about what’s been happening, it’s about what’s going to happen from here on in. Here’s three predictions
Advertising as we know it will cease to exist.Static mass media (fixed location, fixed time-slot) will become niche.Relevancy will rule.Permission will rule.Courtesy will rule.
The dissapearance of mass media advertising will change the very nature of agencies – those that survive will have stopped pissing their client’s money away on banner ads and adopted new business models that are based on how people work rather than on how advertising works.They’ll have adopted new marketing paradigms which are based on Marketing to the ‘social web’Being aggregators rather than broadcasters Community & content will become the marketers new jobAggregate/provide compelling contentCreate retail environments that customers want to visitParticipate in the public arenaAs you produce content, you become a mediumIndividuals and companies are becoming mediaMarketing has always had to shape itself around media
They will understand people – and know that they have to get intimate with their customers in order to penetrate their personal firewalls.If you don’t play by my rules I’ll block you.I am my mediaMy prime-time is when I say it is.If you want to reach me you have to know me.I’ll let you in when it suits me.Interactions with brand will become increasingly important:Creating engaging contentProviding exceptional experiencesMy relationship with your brand will be one-to-one.
6 degrees of separation
We’re all just a click away.Social networking application has brought us all closer together.Finding old friends and creating new ones has never been easier.And communicating has never been easier. We can: text, chat, message, VoIP, email, join cliques, groups, networks, poke, throw sheep and smear with peanut butter.Or to expose ourselves, lay our lives open: our likes, dislikes, tastes in music, movies, literature, our career paths, education
After years of promise, the web will move fully to mobile phones – no doubt!
At the moment, most businesses are launching with apps but I think apps are a temporary phase in the evolution of mobile. Ultimately, the world will to move towards mobile websites. If you think about it we’ve kind of been here before - In the late 90s, it was common for companies to spend a fortune on Flash websites but they soon learned that Flash was cumbersome, slow to load, expensive to build, and hard to update, and moved on to HTML.It seems to me that the exact same thing has replayed itself on the iPhone. Companies have paid a lot of money for an iPhone app. Now they have to keep the iPhone app in sync with their regular web site, and have to add additional native apps, each at a high price point, due to the hypergrowth of Android and now newly viable platforms like Windows Phone 7.During this transitional phase however, apps have and will allow businesses to experiment on mobile business models right now – to deliver a quality experience to consumers and to work out what they can and can’t do on mobile – ultiamtely to figure out how they make it a new revenue generator.HTML 5 will offer a cross-platform solution that will include the functions businesses need to deliver a high quality, highly functional mobile web experiences.
In fact the transition is already starting to happen ....In the US, banks and airlines, commonly seen as technology laggards, are well ahead of the rest of the industry when it comes to mobile access to their systems. Banks and airlines are deploying highly functional, HTML5 mobile optimized websites that offer a high level of functionality relative to their full-fledged websites and existing iPhone apps.
What the app stores have show quite clearly is that people will pay for mobile content they value. In fact, the billing relationship which apple has with its online subscribers is what lies at the heart of the success of the app store. For some people, iTunes is the web for when it comes to digital content - closely followed by Faccebook - once facebook introduces some unified microbilling system system (which it will) and this spreads out to the web, I think we’ll see a host of ‘traditional’ subscription models hit the wall as people ditch them in favour of pick and mix style content consumption. Ultimately to emulate the successof the app store publishers will have to crack their billing relationship with users.