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April 30, 2006
New New Media Continues
This past week’s rumors about Microsoft’s impending acquisition of Massive aren’t just a validation of the potential of in-game advertising, but I also view them as supporting the notion of what I previously called “new new media” in a post a year ago. While the shift away from traditional advertising dollars has already found its way online, I believe that it increasingly will proliferate into other digital formats and venues.
My original list included the three new new forums: ads in video games, ads in mobile phones, and ads via boxes (DVRs, VOD, IPTV Boxes, IP-based, etc). (And in the meantime, we’ve seen some unique examples of these come to light, like birds-eye view advertising in the game “Second Life”) I’ve also subsequently blogged about the opportunity in the proliferation of digital signage. In my mind, I’ve considered adding podcast advertising in to the list, but my skepticism with the media-type remain. And I’m sure that I should add advertising on downlodable videos to my ipod and a number of other formats.
In reality, though, it isn’t completely necessary to enumerate an exhaustive list. The opportunity for new new media advertising is any place where digital content is consumed. So while the speculated price of the Massive transaction is affected by Microsoft’s investment in XBOX and defensibility vs. Sony, the message I believe is clear: “new new media” isn’t so new any more.
Posted by at 8:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)April 29, 2006
New New Media Continues
This past week’s rumors about Microsoft’s impending acquisition of Massive isn’t just a validation of the potential of in-game advertising, but I also view it as supporting the notion of what I previously called “new new media” in a post a year ago. While the shift away from traditional advertising dollars has already found its way online, I believe that it increasingly will proliferate into other digital formats and venues.
My original list included the three new new venues: ads in video games, ads in mobile phones, and ads via boxes (DVRs, VOD, IPTV Boxes, IP-based). (And in the meantime, we’ve seen some interesting examples come to light, like birds-eye view advertising in the game “Second Life”) I’ve also subsequently blogged about the opportunity in the proliferation of digital signage. In my mind, I’ve considered adding advertising in podcasts to the list, but my skepticism with the media-type remain. And I’m sure that I should add advertising on downlodable videos to my ipod and a number of other formats.
In reality, though, it isn’t completely necessary to enumerate an exhaustive list. The opportunity for new new media advertising is any place where digital content is consumed. So while the speculated price of the Massive transaction is affected by Microsoft’s investment in XBOX and defensibility vs. Sony, the message I believe is clear: “new new media” isn’t so new any more.
Posted by at 12:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)The Simple Online Inventory Equation
If we take it as a given that we are in the midst of a monumental shift of advertising dollars flowing from traditional venues towards online (cite your favorite report here; I’ll use last week’s IAB/PwC’s as an example), then there are a number of implications we can draw from the following simple equation:
In other words, the total advertising dollars spent on the internet is a function of two levers: the ability to monetize each page and the number of pages available. Some of the resulting deductions are natural. For example, if the dollars online spent continues to increase, then either CPM rates will rise, the amount of content available will increase, or both. As Mark Kvamme noted in his speech at Ad:Tech this week, the disparity between typical $65 CPM rates on television vs. $30 CPM premium internet or $10 CPM run-of-site is real, and arguably unsustainable.
Likewise, the amount of content that has and will continue to be created to support these advertising dollars continues to rise. The distinction to note, however, is that we’re not witnessing the creation of more of the same types of content (albeit improved), but rather augmenting the existing set with new types of information and content. I’d argue that the vast majority of pages being created today – whether user-generated or editorially-produced – are supplementing that which is already available, not improving upon it. So for every new product review or news page competing for the same fixed (albeit growing) audience, there are dozens of other pages containing conversations and information which wasn’t previously generated or available. And that is not to mention the recent move towards the proliferation of video online, which is creating vast amounts of content and ad inventory.
Taking the above equation literally, however, does not imply that television advertisers are absolutely getting “bad deal” or that current online ad rates are “on the cheap” ready to significantly rise. The beauty of the interactive medium is the ability to more effectively target the right consumer for the advertiser’s message. Whether advertisers realize it or not, the right metric to view media buys isn’t CPM, but rather effective cost per reaching the right target customer. And while television and print advertisers have striven towards improving this measure though demo- and geo- targeted buys, the interactive medium allows for much more granular targeting. Witness e-mail marketing, contextual CPC campaigns, and search. Now with behaviorally-targeted networks like Tacoda, advertisers can reach consumers with even more precision (e.g. demonstrated car buyers who are surfing ROS news, weather, or sports pages). So while publishers are earning higher CPMs for their pages (thus raising the weighted-average CPM on the ‘net), the technology allows advertisers to more effectively reach who they want, which is the true goal in the first place.
Finally, it appears that the shift away from non-digital to digital media consumption and corresponding advertising spending is also starting to give rise towards other types of “new new media,” but that’s a subject of another post.
What we’re left then, is the opportunity that the Simple Online Inventory Equation supports from a top-level theoretical perspective. If the increase of total dollars spent is our basic assumption, then any established company or startup which fundamentally capitalizes on the terms on the left-hand side of the equation will benefit: the creation of new content & new content types, and the ability to more effectively target the right customer at the right time towards inducing a transaction.
Posted by at 12:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (1)April 27, 2006
My First Podcast
A week or so ago, I was invited by Mark Withington to participate in a podcast discussion about evolving web 2.0 business models. Also joining the conversation were local thought-leaders Pito Silas and Brian Del Vecchio. As Mark notes, the conversation winds “its way through [topics like] risk-sharing, abundance of software, loosely coupled transactions and even broaches the possibility of incentive pricing as a means of monetizing development.”
I’ve expressed skepticism in the past about the adoption of consuming podcasts because of their temporal nature. So this month’s Forrester report highlighting low adoption wasn’t a complete surprise to me. But participating in the content creation of one was both engaging and enjoyable. Whether anyone will actually listen is another story…
If you are interested in checking the podcast out, you can read more about it on Mark’s page
or directly download the MP3 here.
April 21, 2006
Inputting and Seeing is Believing
While it wasn’t truly news, I found the release for the Ipsos Insight report, Mobile Phones Could Soon Rival the PC As World’s Dominant Internet Platform, to have some telling facts. Subtitled “Mobile Phones Poised To Overtake The PC As The Dominate Internet Platform In Some Markets,” it included findings like:
• “Globally, just over one-fourth (28%) of mobile phone owners worldwide have browsed the Internet on a wireless handset.”• “[There is a] strong association between Internet usage and mobile phone ownership. Among those who had gone online in the past 30 days, household ownership spiked to over 90% in 10 of the 12 global markets studied.”
The release also put forth the (nearly self-evident statement), “Internet browsing via a wireless device is showing robust growth in many global markets, [but in]... the U.S. and Canada, where wireless Internet access via notebook PC appears to be emerging as the stronger out-of-home Internet platform.”
So it was interesting to read about progress on both platforms highlighted in blogs this week. As a self-described “proponent” of UMPC (Ultra Mobile PC) platform (aka Origami) Michael Parekh riffed a bit on a patent application by Apple on describing “activation of virtual keys of a touch screen keyboard.” (via UMPC news). Worth clicking-through to check out some of the diagrams and Michael’s thoughts.
Also, Russell Beattie talked about new Japanese mobile phones with VGA displays. Better yet, his commentary on Nokia’s recent “Buttons for Humans” campaign for entry into the flip-phone market rang true, “The most heinous crimes ever committed against the physical human interface we call a mobile phone keypad were perpetrated by none other than Nokia itself!”
Russell’s two posts really hit the core issues of any portable device, regardless of platform (mobile phone or wireless PC). Boiled to its essence from a user’s point of view, the differences between these platforms are simple – input and display, which drive the form factor. And so while it looks like the Apple patents diagrams are initially applied to UMPC devices, with a longer time horizon, these alternative methodologies for inputting could be applied to the mobile as well. I mean, how long have rumors about an Apple mobile phone been circulating? So while the Ipsos report makes the distinction between wireless devices and wireless notebook PCs, I don’t care (in the long run). To me, the real story broader story here is that mobile internet access – regardless of device – is trending upwards. And as innovative displays and input methods progress, we’ll see technology facilitating that adoption.
April 12, 2006
Where Mobile Advertisements Roam
In a post today by Rafat Ali on MocoNews.net (Mobile Contextual Advertising: What About The Landing Page?), he wonders about text-based ads on basic WAP sites,
“So even if you think text-based contextual advertising is easily portable to the mobile, does it mean that the landing page from those contextual ads are also mobile-friendly? Unless they have been specially created for mobile, probably not. Just something to ponder upon…”
Text-based and other mobile advertisements are coming to a screen near you, as I conjectured in Opportunity on the Third Screen last September. Rafat raises a good question, though – who is going to use this medium and how are they going to do it?
All advertising eventually leads to some type of commerce transaction. However, there’s a spectrum along which advertisers fall that covers how immediate the transaction occurs. On one end, there’s metric-driven performance-based advertising which measures it success directly by whether or not commerce happens immediately (or in the trackable near-future). On the opposite end is brand advertising, which supports the general perspective and attributes of a brand, so that eventually a constituent who sees an ad influences a future purchasing decision, either individually or as part of an organization. And then there’s everything in between, where the ad isn’t direct response per se, but is still aiming towards a transaction sometime in future, to varying degrees.
My intuition and anecdotal evidence tells me that the first instances and early adopters of mobile advertising which Rafat refers to will be at the very ends of the spectrum, but not in the middle, and thus won’t face the problem he cites. Either the contextual advertising will be purely a branding building effort in that the mere mention of the company/product with a simple message is sufficient to get the point across, so that the need to clickthrough to a landing page won’t be high. Or, the advertiser will be offering a metric driven mobile transaction (e.g. ringtone, wallpaper, etc. or clickthrough to another mobile content site) where it will have a WAP site and landing page already set up regardless.
In either case, the quandary that Rafat is pondering won’t really be a problem until advertisers in the middle of the spectrum, who don’t have a mobile landing page, will need to create a presence. In other words, mobile advertising, at least in the short term, will be effective for those who gain a true advantage for reaching consumers in a mobile experience – because of the “undivided consumer attention” for pure brand advertisers and due to inducing performance-based transactions for direct marketers. Everyone else possesses better (digital media) venues as alternatives where they already offer a presence.
April 10, 2006
Microchunking Doesn’t Mean Microconsumption
Umair Haque has been an evangelist for the microchunking of media content – reducing content to its simplest unbundled form. Fred Wilson built on that notion saying that the “Future of Media” is to microchunk it, free it, syndicate it, and monetize it. I largely agree with this characterization of the direction digital media is headed, and have blogged a bit about the ramifications of it (e.g. Temporal Content and Advertisements Need Expectations).
As Umair notes in his dense but incredibly thoughtful Media Economics powerpoint, microchunking allows for content to be “aggregated and reconstructed in hyperefficient ways” to “explode the media supply” (pg 33). However, I wanted to put forth the distinction that I believe microchunking doesn’t mean microconsumption. Just because our media can be dis- and re- assembled into tiny bits doesn’t suggest that we’re going to consume it in a discrete and disconnected manner.
Newspapers didn’t do away with longer-form novels, nor did television sit-coms replace feature-length movies. Rather, these new forums for printed word and video, respectively, created new genres and media types. I suspect the same will hold true for microchunked digital content.
In a recent interview, the CEO of YouTube hailed “the birth of a new clip culture.” He’s right in saying that “There is a complete shift happening in digital media entertainment and users are now in control of what they watch and when they watch it… we are seeing an evolution of entertainment and media distribution — where the audience is now in control more than ever.” He goes on to say that “professional content is absolutely of interest with our viewers — so long as it is entertaining and short-form.” While long-form may not be YouTube’s business model (for likely legitimate reasons), I find it hard to believe the implication that we will fully shift to a “clip culture” where all content is consumed in short-form.
Longer-form content will be divided into pieces for people to remix, but I suspect that many will be very happy to consume it in its original state. Perhaps it’s merely semantics, but once several microchunks are reconstituted into something longer, the consumer’s “session” will be a longer form (whether it’s a series of video clips stacked, a fuller “personalized” newspaper, etc.) In other words, while content is trending towards consumption in smaller increments, and microchunking facilitates that change, I doubt that pendulum will completely swing in that direction. A good example of this in action – the day can’t be too far away when I can “watch” a baseball game in half an hour, with all of the plays microchunked and stacked together without intervals between pitches. Although the content is microchunked in this case, I would still sit back for an extended period to take it in. Microchunking without microconsumption. So while consuming content on a mobile device and other short-form states will trend upwards in the next couple years, sitting back to relax and watch/read won’t fade away.
In the end, people will indeed consume media where they want to and how they want to – including how long they want to spend with it. (And in the level of production quality which they want, but that’s the subject of another post).
April 9, 2006
Rambling on Digital Personas
I think that it’s interesting to note that in transitioning towards a digital world, we are increasingly carrying numerous digital personas which affect how people contact us, how we communicate our personal media, and how we consume personalized media.
There are numerous ways to contact me digitally, and each aspect of “me” corresponds to a different way. The “personal me” can be contacted on my gmail address, my mobile number, and my personal IM. My “work me” can be contacted on my work number, my work e-mail address, my work IM, Skype, through LinkedIn, etc. And the “blogger me” also has a separate e-mail address. The funny thing is that all of these so-called separate contact methods all end up in the same place – whichever all-encompassing digital device I happen to be using at the time. Accordingly, it seems that there’s signal value in the digital method you choose to communicate in addition to the message in it. (As an aside, I can assign semi-disposable different e-mail, IM, and Skype names/addresses to different “me’s.” Wouldn’t it be great if I could do that with mobile numbers as well?)
But my digital personas affect more than just the way people reach me, it also affects how I outwardly communicate. Of course, any digital forum which I communicate directly with one individual person, the adopted persona is clear. But what about more public communications? Is the blogger me representative of the personal me or the work me – or somewhere in between? What about photos of me on Flickr? You can certainly find some work-related photos of me on it, and there are quite a few non-professional personal ones as well. Many of them were even posted by others. This leads to the question of your own online reputation, whether or not it is what you want it to be. It’s fairly innocuous when my own 12K race results from a few years back are readily accessible, but it’s another when college students’ Facebook/MySpace profiles weren’t intended to be viewed by a professional audience. Because bits have a tendency to flow unencumbered, our different digital personas don’t always have bright lines between them.
Finally, which digital persona I am wearing affects the type of information which I want to receive. A personalized Findory page works very well to customize my tech news while I am at work, but what about when I am home and want to read about sports? And my media preferences change depending on if I am consuming by myself, in a group of friends, or with my family. The media which I want to consume depends on where and “who” I am at the time. Perhaps it’s a theoretical question, but do I want one true personalized information stream or several personalized information streams corresponding to each digital persona?
In all three of these cases in the digital world, the question of “Who am I?” takes on a richer set of meaning and complexity.
April 7, 2006
Lessons on Being Lucky & the Three Components of Viral Adoption
We’ve seen a lot of recent examples of consumer web services and content which have taken off with viral adoption. While my perspective is that people over-use the term “viral”, it’s obvious that success cases are tremendous.
I’ve been thinking a bit recently about what truly makes an online service/service viral, and I’ve come to a (very preliminary) conclusion that it rests on three variables:
1. How inherently sharable it is. If people like what they see or do, they’re going to want to communicate about it to others.2. How easily sharable it is. I’ve written before that friction is multiplicative – it’s important to reduce friction before and after desire actions because conversation rates in a several step process multiply across the entire sequence as a whole. Therefore, the simpler it is to share a content or service (which includes the messaging about the steps, as well as the difficulty of the steps themselves), the better.
3. How integrated the sharing is into the content or the service. The more deeply imbedded the act of referring is into the product the product or service itself, the more natural is becomes to share it, as the user spreads recommendations simply by using the service or content itself. (I’ve talked more about this notion here).
Perhaps these three components themselves are multiplicative? Dare I suggest a theoretical equation to summarize/articulate?
Viral adoption = (how inherently sharable x how easily sharable) x (integration of sharing into content/service)
My ideas about these issues were brought to mind today when I read a great piece from Marketing Sherpa, “Viral Marketing Hall of Fame 2006: Top 12 Campaigns You Should Swipe Ideas From.” It lists and then goes into great detail about a dozen highly successful recent viral campaigns and the lessons to be learned from them. While some of the recommendations are obvious (“blogs are now the seed campaign of choice”), there are some very insightful remarks about presentation of, patience with, and predictions about online viral marketing. Anyone with a hand in or an interest in marketing online services with a viral component should definitely read the entire piece.
Posted by at 5:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (2)