Our Identity in Flux and the Role Brands Can Play from Amanda Mooney on Vimeo.
British Government to appoint a digital champion!
The british government is looking to appoint a high-profile person to promote the benefits of using digital technologies to all citizens.
The digital champion will take responsibility for encouraging people to use digital technology.
The call was made today by minister for digital inclusion Paul Murphy MP at the GovNet Communications' Mobile Government conference.
Murphy said that 17m people in the UK were currently digitally excluded thus missing out on opportunities of education, communication and entertainment.
He added that young people without access to digital technology were likely to suffer, particularly within their careers where 90% of job applications are now done online.
Go Britain!
Bravo!
I just wanted to say that i love this new campaign from Amnesia for Aussie Home Loans.
I think it's an excellent example of how to turn a creative idea into a fantastic digital campaign execution which is traditionally really bloody difficult because you're doing it backwards! (execution should technically come before creative)...
I am not sure how many of you are familiar with the current TV ad for Aussie Home Loans where they have a mortgage broker jumping out of a plane with the claim of being able to offer a better home loan deal wherever he should land or give you $300.
Well Amnesia had the idea of turning this into a reality.
So they found Duane Brown who is an actual Aussie Home Loans mortgage broker and asked him how he would feel about jumping out of a plane...he said yes (crazy man!) and thus the Freefall Challenge was created.
On April 6th Duane will be throwing himself out of an aeroplane in the hope of landing on the doorstep of an unsuspecting (but nevertheless needy) homeowner whom he can help by getting them a better deal on their home loan.
Now comes the exciting part, (as if it's not already merited it's own reality TV show), we can all get involved! On the Freefall Challenge website we can take a guess as to where Duane may land once he takes to the skies, and if we get it right we can win $3,000.
Now, Australia is a big place so pin-pointing Duanes landing could be pretty difficult... but those folks at Amnesia have offered a helping hand by seeding bonus codes via Duanes Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and Youtube profiles which will give clues as to whereabouts it could be.
The execution is interactive, engaging, open to everyone & provides an excellent 'social objects' in regards to it's talkability, competition elements, videos, Twitter updates and sheer craziness...throwing a monetary prize in is just a bonus!
Well done to Amnesia for coming up with a great idea and well done to the client, Aussie Home Loans, for having the guts to do it.
Links to the campaign microsite & Duanes youtube channel are below:
Syndication is the future...
I was reading this week that Virgin Media, Yahoo & Sky in the UK are planning to follow in Google's gigantic footsteps to develop tools to allow people to tailor & personalise their homepages in a (desperate) bid to generate customer loyalty....
My first thought on this is: 'why bother'?
RSS Feeds, Widgets and Social Network apps already allow people to source and collate the content they want so why would they want to do the same but be limited to the Virgin Media homepage or the Yahoo homepage or the Sky homepage?
Their goal is to encourage stickiness and boost interaction which in turn, they are hoping, will drive ad revenue. They have already tied in UK advertisers such as Money Supermarket and CareerBuilder to take the newly created commercial spots that fit in with the new design - but honestly, who wants ads on their personalised homepage? I certainly wouldn't....
I can understand their plight with dwindling audience figures and subsequent dwindling ad revenues - desperate times call for desperate measures but i am not convinced that the 'personalisation' of their homepages is the best course of action.
Now i am not going to claim to be able to solve the critical business issues these corporations are struggling with but what i can do is talk about an example of how another corporation has approached this issue.
The BBC is percieved as one of the most conservative corporations on the planet, yet they have been quietly embarking on an exciting strategic evolution which is quickly turning them into one of the worlds most forward thinking content publishers.....
In an uncharacteristic turn of events, the BBC have demonstrated an impressive and thorough understanding of our changing communications landscape.They have parted ways with their traditional british pride and relinquished control over their content.
Syndication and distribution is the new name of the game and the BBC are leading the pack. BBC Worldwide content is now widely available across the web which they have understood is entirely neccessary to reach potential users who are increasingly unlikely to come directly to BBC Worldwide’s own sites, however, they have also understood the potential commercial gains..
In February 2007 BBC Worldwide became the first global broadcaster to partner with YouTube, and in January 2008 it secured a worldwide deal with MySpace to provide clips of BBC content to MySpace TV. It also signed an agreement in the UK to sell BBC programmes on a download-to-own basis via Apple iTunes, a deal repeated in the US and which will be replicated in other territories around the world. Another deal was struck with Sony Playstation for Top Gear to be downloaded through Gran Turismo TV. Such agreements have helped to establish BBC Worldwide as a leading content distributor for both BBC and independently produced content on digital platforms and they do not require people to directly visit the BBC website in order to have a BBC brand experience...
So as i said, whilst i cannot claim to be able to solve the business issues that some content providers are facing i can attempt to point them in the right direction and that is away from trying to fence in audiences and away from requiring people to visit their websites directly...
For example - Sky does have some cool tools they are planning to integrate such as 'Never Miss' which launched recently - a TV reminder service to cater to its online subscribers to remind them to record their favourite shows when they are coming up - but i still don't believe they need to house this within a homepage, why not turn it into an RSS feed or widget that can be taken and utilised anywhere?
Lesson of the day: Capitalise on fragmentation and syndicate like crazy!
Tick-tock-tick-tock.....time to increase efficiency.
In the current economic environment advertisers are clawing back budgets and shouting from the rooftops about increased efficiencies & effectiveness.
The original buzzword is back with avengence: ROI.
So having exhausted all the DR channels i can find for a certain client my attention is now focusing on time targeting.
A recent study from the IAB UK claimed that advertisers are failing to target users at the time of day when they're most receptive to ad messages.
Despite day-part targeting being common practice in the planning of above-the-line advertising, with Outdoor & Radio especially, online advertisers and agencies haven't traditionally embraced the idea to its fullest extent.
A survey by the IAB and Lightspeed Research in the UK found more than half (51%) of people are more receptive to advertising after 6pm. The findings suggest advertisers that take advantage of this prime evening period to target consumers could increase campaign penetration and reduce wastage.
Obviously this is a UK survey so i did a little bit of digging around the main networks in Australia and asked them how regularly they are approached to do time targeted activity.
The answer was, suprisingly, not very often at all.
So that suggests to me that we, like the UK, could be missing a trick here....
I used to work on a big pizza brand in the UK and time targeting was their biggest strategy.
We targeted them when they were hungry (ground breaking stuff!) during lunchtimes & evenings only - getting the bang for our buck.
The food analogy is a clear standout for the utilisation of time targeting but why can't the same policy be applied to every product or service?
We can't assume that people are just as receptive to ads from financial institutions, FMCG retailers and technology companies at every second of every day even if we are in contextually relevant environments.
We think we really understand the consumer mindset when planning hence the environments we place our advertising in are so carefully thought out, but has anyone really done any research into click through rates & conversion by time of day and day of week and then actively applied those learnings?
I agree that we could be in danger of micro-planning when we start throwing in contextual placements, behavioural targeting, re-messaging & demographics as well as time targeting but i still believe that it should be a model we take a serious look at especially when it comes to increasing efficiencies for our clients during this time of lowered spending & consumption.
Why 'last click wins' is utter b*****ks
Advertising Age published a fantastic article entitled 'Why the click is the wrong metric for online ads'.
I have outlined some of the key paragraphs below:
"Publishers have a lot to gain," said Steve Kerho, VP-analytics, media and marketing optimization at Organic. Mr. Kerho has been doing lots of analysis on how online-display ads affect search and conversions and found that in some cases, a display ad can increase a search ad's click-through rate 25% to 30%. If he had simply measured the clicks from search, he would have missed the display ads' influence.
John Squire, chief strategy officer of web-analytics firm Coremetrics, which today is launching a service that helps marketers give proper credit to their many online ads, likens it to an offline example: You're headed to the supermarket and on your way in you see the big sign in the window advertising ground round for $3.99 a pound. You need some anyway, so you buy it. In the online world, which measures the last ad seen, that sign alone would be given credit for your purchases in the store. But it's quite likely that you were going shopping in the first place because you saw something in the weekend circular that you wanted to buy or maybe you heard a radio ad. Under the last-ad-attribution model, the circular is worth, at worst, nothing, and at best far less than the ad for ground chuck in the storefront.
A ComScore research study called 'Wither the click', which studied 139 online ad campaigns by marrying data from its panel of U.S. internet users with shopper data, found online ads, even when they didn't result in a click, increased a consumer's likelihood of making a purchase at an advertiser's retail store by 17% and increased visits to a marketer's website by an average of 40%.
"Virtually any seller that's not a search engine or affiliate [network] is not getting the proper credit for their ads," said Esco Strong, market research manager at the Atlas Institute. "There's a disconnect in terms of the actual work that's delivering people through that [sales] funnel and the sale and there's a disconnect in how advertisers are measuring their ads and planning their campaigns."
Read the full article here: http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=134787
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