Ikea can haz interwebs cultyure?

Cats had to get into video designed for the TV screen sooner or later didn't they? The thinking behind Ikea's 'Happy Inside' video is pretty straightforward: the brand premise is aspirational but cheap, and the trade off for cheap is the dehumanising big box trolley dash of the shopping experience. So what would make an Ikea warehouse look like a home? Cats. And cats conveniently enough also have the power to spread videos on the internet. Here's the background.

So far, so awesome. But when you see the finished TV ad, a lot of that potential awesomeness has vanished. Although cat videos are the internet's uber-meme, there is no trace of reference to them other than the animals themselves. The cats are being used outside of the rich seam of references that could be played upon in the films. Which makes it all a little bit 'glossy production no culture'.


It all seems to be taking itself a bit seriously. Now since we're talking about serious TV ads here's how to do several levels of postmodern category awareness. Baby Carrots: Eat 'Em Like Junk Food is the best ad I've seen since Old Spice - it plays every 'taking itself too seriously' trick/cliche in the book with the full knowledge that the audience know that they are tricks/cliches too, and that it is only by going to the ironic extreme that a junk food ad would go to seriously, that you can suggest re-evaluating baby carrots in a junk food wrapper. And more importantly they are fun.



Sort of like Tango - an excuse to embed my favourite 90s Tango ad

Augmented TV

Never mind that we haven't got a reliable way to get internet content onto the home's biggest screen yet (I've been banging on about an Apple TV announcement for ages...is it happening this week?) there's now an AR browser for TV - MetaMirror is effectively an app for smaller screened devices that can view TV content and overlay extra info - like recipe info in the picture, but let's face it, real time odds and click-to-buy ads would be the business model. Or imagine the Tesco API powering a cooking programme - with one click add to basket functions....

It makes sense that augmented TV will go down this route, as using two screens is far easier than using one - ask anyone who has tried to live tweet from their desktop while streaming TV on it - you end up minimising, moving and generally messing around with windows rather that watching. When Google TV launches I'd expect a Goggles-powered Android app that does the same thing running Adsense alongside the augmentations.

(link and photo courtesy of PFSK)

Save 6Music. At the expense of what?

If anyone has ever scrolled all the way down the side of this blog to the LastFM widget, they would probably guess that I listen to 6Music as well. It's basically where they let all the most opinionated and passionate music fans on the BBC payroll (Steve Lamacq, Marc Riley, Lauren Laverne, Jarvis Cocker, etc) do what they want, in return for doing what the BBC wants the rest of the time. And as has been widely reported, and widely criticised, the BBC are closing it as part of a radical programme of cuts.

To me this raises are few interesting questions. Firstly, the fact that popular and cross party political opinion leaves the BBC no choice but to make cuts to defend its licence fee. Before the recession an ambitious BBC could defend its increasing commercialisation of brands like Top Gear and CBeebies (which owe their popularity to having initially been licence-fee funded) by having to compete with ad-funded competition. Since ad-funded competition has all but disappeared in a perfect storm of disappearing ad revenues and pension deficit disasters (not to mention a distinct lack of leadership/recruitment crisis at critical moments from the main terrestrial competition), this argument has vanished, and probably won't return.

So the BBC is left with a healthy licence fee income while ITV and C4 slash programming budgets and staff. As the newspaper industry goes to town on stories of rampant expenditure on salaries (management as well as Wossy) and Broadcasting House refurbishment, defending the BBC's sole use of licence fee income becomes impossible without cuts of some kind.

On one hand, 6Music is exactly what the BBC should be producing - things that appeal to niche audiences where there is no commercial alternative. While the remit of a licence fee funded media company has to cover the whole country, there is no excuse in the 21st century for thinking that this has to be in one place. The BBC shouldn't need to care about the ratings of individual programmes, simply about their cumulative reach across the whole country every month. In lots of little, personally relevant chunks.

Looking at it from that perspective, the cost saving opportunities become more obvious. ITV makes better soaps that the BBC (or it makes, Corrie, which is better than Eastenders). It also makes better Saturday night peak - Pop Idol vs Celebrity Come Dancing. So those are my opinions, but they are backed by viewing figures most weeks. Anyway, there are more popular alternatives commercially available. Why not cut the expensive stuff that commercial broadcasters do better, and concentrate on the niches.

On the other hand, it is quite possible that there would be commercial alternatives to the niche personal stuff that the BBC makes, if only they didn't make it. ITV still has a business model when BBC1 exists, as does News Int to compete with bbc.co.uk (although Murdoch doesn't seem to agree). Perhaps the commercially funded 6Music couldn't exist as it could never escape the shadow of Radio 1. All 6Music really is is an aggregation of the music tastes and opinions of some well respected music industry professionals, backed by the marketing support of Radio 1. Intriguingly, the barriers to those individuals continuing to curate their opinions and tastes for an hour a week are pretty small: Ricky Gervais pretty much wrote the manual on this in podcasting terms, but there are all sorts of ways of dicing this up through iTunes, LastFM, and hundreds of other routes. The technology and distribution costs are tiny. The streaming rights are all in place on Spotify. LastFM, We7, etc. So do the people involved in 6Music think it is worth saving?

Personally I'm signing all the petitions to #Save6Music. Not because I like it - I do, but that's irrelevant. We should save it because it represents what the BBC should do far better than Eastenders or anything on Saturday night peak BBC1. But if it isn't saved by the BBC then I hope that the curators who made it what it is can prove that it is commercially viable.

Open Vs 'Just Works' - convergence part 1

So I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I'm researching some new entertainment hardware. At some point this might lead to actually buying some, but in the meantime it is a bit of light entertainment for geeks. But since I've written a lot here over the last year about how technology can (or at some point over the next few years, will) disrupt how we consume entertaining content, it is also relevant to post. Not least because it cuts to the heart of the open vs closed internet/technology systems battle.As there's a fair chance that no-one will be remotely interested in what my living room looks like, I'm going to post this in two parts. The first one is all about me, so you will probably want to skip on to the second one, which is more about the internet....

Ok, so the 'converged hardware' stuff first. There's a joke about a suburban couple who are going to see their friends in the countryside, and somewhere down the winding country roads get horribly lost (geek caveat - obviously a pre satnav joke). Eventually they see a farmer walking up to the side of the road, and pull up to ask him how to get to their friend's house. He looks at them, looks across the field, and has a think. Eventually he says "Well I'm not too sure. But I know I wouldn't start from here"

I've been thinking about that a lot when looking at hardware, as like anyone else who has a computer, a mobile and a TV, I am starting from here. And here is different for everyone. I have a Sky+ box with lots of movies and sports on it, and I have a MacBook that syncs to my mobile, camera and video camera. I also have a remote hard drive that stores all the music, photos etc so they don't take up extra storage on my wife's computer. All the Sky subscriptions work on any computer or our mobiles. I pull YouTube, iPlayer, 4OD, etc into a Boxee interface on my computer, more because I can than because it is particularly easier. I could use my phone as a remote control, but that also seems a little bit pointless if it is only controlling a laptop.

What I'd like to be able to do is:

1. put all this stuff onto a TV screen (ok the Sky stuff is already there, but....)
2. I can only record Sky movies onto the Sky+ box

I could rip movies in real time on my laptop from SkyPlayer, but what's the point when I could buy it on DVD, cos it's easier.

So some of this is possible. XBox is leading the way in putting TV content back on the TV screen (some 9% of iPlayer streams were delivered through XBox OS in December 09). Boxee (based on Xbox Media Center software) would just need a couple of connecters to plug my laptop into the TV, or alternatively I could wait until the Boxee set top box that D-Link are producing is released in the UK, at come point in the next few months. Or until the end of the year when Project Canvas set top boxes apparently deliver on their promise of being Freeview for internet TV. Or I could track down a second hand Mac Mini, which does a computer's job while looking like a set top box. However, as I'm starting from where I am at the moment, I wouldn't dream of using Apple TV, which is based on the iTunes premise of micropayment for content. I've bought into the 'all you can eat' Sky+ version.

And none of this will help me to link up with, and record movies to view later though, Sky. Sky+ was revolutionary because it just works - anyone can use it (rather than any other hardware or software DVRs that I have seen, which take a spare few hours and a degree in hardware geekery - so ok for me, but no fun for the rest of the family). In order to just work, it is a closed proprietary system that doesn't play nice with pretty much anything else. That doesn't mean that the content that goes into it is closed: you can fit satellite cards into computers. So that leads me onto the question of whether it is worth buying a new computer to run a software DVR alongside the Sky+. Now I've already mentioned a Mac Mini, and if it was that simple then I'd go and get one, but unfortunately Apple is also a pretty closed system for which Sky satellite cards are not available. So I'd be looking at a Windows 7 machine.

This could well be a blessing, as Windows 7 Media Center is rumoured to be extremely good at syncing with multiple TV cards (which I'd need, so that I could stream Sky content and record to disc whilst watching other stuff). That starts to look quite expensive though, when you add in all the add-ons that a Windows machine would need to sync, store, network and deliver content. Because if i was going all out and buying a new pc, then it would need to be able to do music over the network as well......

So there doesn't seem to be an easy way forward. There are just a lot of different ways, all of which will work to a degree, with a lot of effort, and probably less than seamlessly. And you can probably tell by my current reliance on Apple and Sky products, lack of effort and seamless are all important. That's the beauty of closed systems - someone else does the difficult bit for you so that everything just works. The flip side is that customising, improving, making things work together becomes more difficult if they aren't designed as part of the same ecosystem.

Things to watch in 2010

Okay this is a little late, but I wanted to have a think about some trends for this year. I'm deliberately not saying predictions, as this is all stuff that is happening, and in most cases I realised that I'd already written about the stuff I think will be important this year and don't have much more to add (we are only five days in after all). So I'm just going to link to the original posts rather than paraphrase myself.....

Location
Don't want to burst the bubble, as there is so much potential in always-on location-aware map-enabled applications, but I can't see Foursquare or Gowalla going mainstream this year. They are much more like where Twitter was two years ago. Proof?The 'also visited' section of a UK Trends for Websites search on Foursquare. We like it, no-one else cares. I think the overall rise in knowledge of and usefulness of location-enabled applications will mean that unless a killer app is launched before Q3 then this will be a slow burner (if 1/2m Android v2 handsets are sold before June then the satnav application alone might do it. Other than that I'm holding out for Foursquare turning Glastonbury into an actual competition with the whole festival for who saw the most bands, while Orange turn the festival guide into an AR app complete with on screen menus and pricelists for every food stall).

The year of mobile
Of course it will be the year of mobile. Just like last year, and the year before that. But more so. The iPhone has revolutionised not just the mobile market, but overall technology (ie communications, entertainment, everything else we use it for). Hyperbole? Well the sales figures agree: Mary Meeker's slide shows the speed of penetration of the iPhone/ iPod Touch compared to the previous fastest growing tech products (and a couple of other big hits from Apple's own categories). And why is this important? Because everyone else is catching up. Google/HTC, Motorola, Nokia, RIM are finally competing in a market that has changed beyond all recognition from the unwieldy backwards mobile landscape of 2006. And they are doing so by providing products that acknowledge that always connected technology based on ease of use and access to entertainment, friends and, well, pretty much anything that you want finally delivers on the promise of the mobile internet. Another lift from Mary Meeker shows the comparative market share and share of the mobile internet by mobile OS. The key stats are iPhone global market share at 11%, and share of mobile internet traffic at 65% - the opposite skew from traditional handset manufacturers RIM, WIndows and Nokia/Symbian. That is revolutionary. It means that using an iPhone means that you will use the mobile internet in a completely different way to someone who doesn't. Also worth noting that Android relative share back in April 09 (so Android v1) is skewed exactly the same way as Apple's - as Android is groing to grow exponentially on much better handests this year this is just as important. And if Nokia's N900, and the expected new releases from RIM and Microsoft are in any way competitive then they will work in the same way too. So yes, the year of mobile will be as true as it was the last couple of years, but for a lot more people.

While mobile applications will carry on growing at exponential rates across more devices, the Google Voice/Apple AppStore dispute shows where apps will start to develop over the next 18 months. As Apple wouldn't allow a web-based phone service in the store, Google rebuilt the app's functionality as a web app. As mobile processor speeds increase and browser functionality improves, websites will be able to do much of what apps can. The rationale for apps will be based on deep integration with the phone's core functions. Anything else will be a bookmark. I don't think that this will happen to any great degree this year as the handset technology isn't there yet, but brands should be asking of marketing-based applications whether they could be better served by a well made site or web app.

HTML 5
A little bit out of my comfort zone on this, but I'm told it'll be ace. I haven't learnt much more since I wrote this

Real Time Search
I'd defy anyone to have predicted the speed with which Twitter took over the British media in the first few months of last year. By summer 2009 Google's search results were starting to look very antiquated: a search engine that could pull up results from 2 years ago when you were looking for a breaking news story? How quaint. And to be fair it didn't take long (roughly $25m) for both Google and Microsoft to access Twitter's (and in Microsoft's case the increasingly public Facebook's) real time stream and start to include them in search results. As Google roles out Caffeine over the next few weeks this will start to have an interesting effect on brands' attitudes to social marketing.

Brands that aren't regularly discussed in social environments have largely tended to avoid showing too much interest in them. In many categories these are brands for whom the internet plays a vital role all the way along the purchase path from research to transaction: ie those who rely most heavily on search results. Google's search algorithm ranked sites based on reputation (of the site based on links) and relevancy (of the content to the search query). As Google becomes able to analyse sites based on their visitors' social graph, this adds a new level of reputation to build into results. The ROI of social marketing? How about the ROI of SEO?

Obviously it is very early days for how Caffeine will affect search results, and the main real time pipe feeding Google results at the moment is Twitter's. For all the hype, actual regular Twitter users are still in the minority. However if Facebook succeeds in convincing even a fraction of its 32m monthly UK users not to change the revised privacy settings it imposed on them last month then this could rapidly start to have a significant impact on how search engines view brand websites (NB. Not Google, as Facebook won't share with them)

Online Identity
The first question that agencies and marketers should ask to gauge how good an idea or a proposal is this year is this: Does it properly integrate Facebook Connect? If it doesn't, you could probably do better. If it doesn't use it at all, you probably aren't doing it right.

Charging for online news
Murdoch's plans for charging for content haven't gone away, but then they haven't got any firmer. I've written a couple of posts on why i don't think it is a good idea, and on how it might work out, and there isn't really anything new to say other than it is definitely happening, and definitely happening this year.

The internet on TV
Considering how far the internet has come in the last year in getting TV onto our computer screens I'm amazed at how utterly difficult it is to do the opposite and far more rewarding job of getting internet TV onto the TV screen. I wrote about this exactly a year ago and thought we'd be a lot further down the line. So Windows 7 came out, Windows Media Center worked great, no-one really used it to run a home entertainment system as they didn't trust a Windows machine to do that; Apple didn't care about Apple TV, LG and Panasonic are still working on release dates for internet enabled TVs, Kangaroo died, Canvas is still a year away. I'm currently trying to build a new TV system so this is partly borne of frustration (and the subject of another post....) but my view is exactly what it was this time last year: the market is backwards looking and stifling innovation. Sound familiar? Music in 2003, Mobile in 2007, TV in 2010. I think Apple are all over this.

Companies to watch -
Polar Rose
Currently makers of facial recognition apps that tag your Facebook photos for you, Polar Rose have just recruited a new CEO from the mobile industry. His job will be to make the video below, real time facial recognition technology, come to life on mobiles, and more generally to make computers see. The internet of things is all very well based on data, but these guys are thinking about genuine visual processing.

Boxee
I've spent a fair amount of time tweeting about TV programmes over the last year, and I'm not the only one. While the main benefits of Boxee are around getting internet content onto the TV screen (their software already does a great job of this for the laptop screen, and the set top box to connect to the TV screen is on sale in the next few months), it also pulls a viewer's social profiles into the TV experience to create integrated social TV. While C4 will get more press when they integrate Facebook Connect across their site in the next couple of months, Boxee is a genuinely new product based on convergent technology that integrates social graphs into the viewing experience.

Microsoft
.... in a way that XBox users will be very familiar with, as Boxee software is based on Microsoft's open source XBMC (X Box Media Center) OS. Which has been integrating social graphs into XBox Live for months. So why a one to watch in 2010? Because Windows 7 was a return to form, and the music and mobile strategies are rumoured to be receiving similar overhauls imminently? No, becuase that is simply keeping up to date with what Apple and Google are up to. Xbox is the big revolutionary play, as from the looks of Project Natal it will do for consoles, in home entertainment and communications what the iPhone did for mobile and computing. Rumoured to be live before the end of the year, this is one to look out for.

Twitter and the FA Cup Final

ITV have been playing around with socially connected TV for a few months now, most notably with the pre-launch event for Primeval, and with @ITVinsider, their well-followed Twitter dialogue with their fans run by @benayers. Most of the interesting conversations have been around their flagship programming like Britain's Got Talent (as you'd expect given its social footprint). So the Twitterfall experiment in tomorrow's FA Cup final looks like opening social TV up to a new audience of footie fans. Nick Burcher has already detailed the potential that this has here, but it got me thinking about what social TV means to TV advertising (ITV's bread and butter revenue stream).

For someone who invests a lot of other people's money in TV advertising, I am not very good at ever seeing it live on TV. Sometimes through choice, but increasingly because I hardly ever watch live TV. Media planners know that there are a lot of other people who view it in this way, which is why genuine appointment to view programming like sports events are so valuable to advertisers and broadcasters, and why football rights in particular are so expensive. Once you know there result of a match, the value in viewing it on Sky+ goes right down. However, most of my viewing of live events is actually not in real-time, it is a few seconds or minutes behind. Close enough that the no-one is going to spoil it by telling me the result, but usually paused here and there during the match. Which then gives me two ad breaks during half time to fast forward and catch up with real-time events. This doesn't get in the way of discussing the action, as everybody in the room is viewing the same events at the same time.

But what I've noticed recently, in the Apprentice generally and the Champions League final in particular, is that viewing even a minute or so behind leaves me out of the wider conversation that is going on on Twitter. Access to a wider set of friends than the one in your living room means that viewing has to be synchronised if conversations are to mean anything. Which for sporting events means that appointments to view have to be live rather than near-live to get full value from them.

There is obviously a long way to go in the development of social TV, but experiments like this start to show how the social currency created by televised sports, reality TV and soaps can be developed into something that not only gives viewers more value for their attention, but also breathes life into the old TV ad model. The old model was based on the concept that content was king. Now content (as Cory Doctorow points out) is just something to talk about, broadcasters are starting to understand the value in the conversation.

(Moot point - will this Twitterfall generate the same level of abuse, swearing and general mischief as previous ones like Skittles or the Telegraph Budget Day? Given that it is designed for English footie fans, you've got to hope that ITV have a level of moderation built in for their own sake. How this affects the real-time nature of the event we will see tomorrow afternoon)

Meeja Kitteh

(Photo Credit)
With apologies to Cheezburgers

This Kangaroo has ceased to be....

(Photo Credit - Flickr user Thomas Rosenzweig)
Right, I'm going to keep this [relatively] short, as I was looking forward to having the BBC's back catalogue on tap as much as the next comedy addict. What's that? Have I heard of YouTube. Oh!

So the Competitions Commission have pulled the plug on Project Kangaroo. The idea of the 3 main broadcast content providers in the UK all distributing through the same portal whilst selling ads separately was referred to in the report as something that 'has to be stopped'. And you can see the Commission's point. After all, this is supposed to be the future of TV, not just exactly the same model as we have now. I can't see the difference between a TV screen that's been showing content from three UK-based content providers since 1982, and a computer screen doing the same. The only winners are the walled gardens that the ISPs would love to lock us into. Something like Boxee is great, but only for the few people who know that they want this type of app and go out and look for it. The sort of marketing that BBC, ITV and C4 can throw at a new technology between them would put UK internet usageitself onto a different level.

Where do they go to from here? Well the market for their content isn't going anywhere. It's just the portal that they aren't allowed to collaborate on. I'd expect to see ITV.com, 4OD and iPlayer scaled up quickly, but this isn't a replacement. It was the robust aggregation platform that would have been the success of of Kangaroo - everything all in one place. If the broadcasters were brave, they would free the content: instream ad units, distributable anywhere. Don't worry too much about the actual viewing platform. Sound familiar? Because it's where we're all going to be viewing our archive UK content now. Until Hulu launches, and BBC, ITV and C4 sell them the content rights. So that 18 months of legal review has got us where exactly? The same result, but US owned.

Cadburys' Difficult Second Album

I've never really thought that you could properly be a fan of a band that had only released one album. The more you like the first one, the greater the potential let-down if everything goes down hill from there. I think it's technically know as Stone Roses syndrome. So I've always reserved judgement, and most of the bands I have loved are ones who have really delivered second time round - stuff like Massive Attack, Goldfrapp, Arcade Fire (NB. I'm not linking to anything here. The point isn't really about my personal music taste).

So for all the well deserved praise for Fallon's Gorilla work for Cadburys, the Glass & a Half Productions idea has seemed a little tarnished for me by the pointless truckracing follow-up (an ad that would have made more sense had it been audio only, as Don't Stop Me Now is the only joyful thing in it).

But there has also been a part of me that will reserve judgment on a band that suffers from difficult second album syndrome. You can always turn it round with the third, as The Killers have recently proved and hopefully Kasabian and Franz Ferdinand will soon. So it made me very happy to see the new Eyebrows work that breaks tonight. Just as warm, arresting and generally daft as the Gorilla, and with much better music (Don't Stop the Rock by Freestyle, since we're talking about tunes).

And apart from being witty and likeable, there's a couple of other things that stand out in this spot. First one is pretty obvious - Gorilla was copied, mimicked, mashed up and responded to, and that took a bit of work - hiring Gorilla suits and drumkits were pretty much a prerequisite for any sort of YouTube homage. This one is clearly designed to be mimicked in offices and playgrounds across the land with a minimum of effort. A sort of visual 'Wassup!'. Second thing is that this is a 60" ad that will get funnier the faster you view it - ie it is virtually DVR-proof. Having only seen the clip posted here I am guessing, but I'm setting the Sky+ for it this evening to see whether it is best at 1x, 6x or 30x normal speed. And as anyone who follows my TV writing will know, that makes me think it is very special indeed.

Transmedia Movies and things that Facebook could do on telly

Right this is inspired by Scott Brown's post on Wired, about the death of the linear story in movies. Ok there's a lot of backstory as well: I'm not going to do Faris Yakob the disservice of trying to condense Transmedia Planning into a few sentences, so if you haven't read about it, go there now. Anyway, the ideas that Brown talks about are based around the movie as a combination of multiple experiences and points of view, which deliver a far more deep and engaging experience than traditional storylines and special FX. So this is how a classic action movie linear narrative such as Die Hard might look in a post-convergence era:

John McClane, NYC cop, arrives in LA to reconcile with his estranged wife—but we already know all about their failing marriage from the ARG we've been obsessed with for the six months leading up to the movie's release. (McClane's potemkin Tumblr blog was especially illuminating.) With exposition rendered obsolete, we open instead on a Sprite commercial, which transitions seamlessly into furious gunplay. We don't even see McClane in the flesh, but our handsets are buzzing with his real-time thumb-tweets: "in the air duct. smelz like dead trrist in here lol." The film then rewinds to McClane Googling "terrorists" to read up on his adversaries. We then flash-cut to the baddies' POV, which we're familiar with (and sympathetic to) thanks to the addictive Xbox hit Die Hard: Hard Out There for a Terrorist.
and so on.....

The idea of an ARG offering a rich backstory to bring fans of a genre into the world of a new movie isn't a new one - Cloverfield is my favourite case study (which I think I annoyed everyone else in the cinema by explaining during the movie. But then the marketing IS much better than the movie). Neither is an Xbox spin-off (although a $0.99 phone app might be quicker to build and reach more people). What caught my attention was the idea of live updates from other characters points of view - not neccessarily tweets, but something that engages all handsets in the cinema (RFID?) to deliver a richer experience.

And that got me thinking about how this then might translate into smaller screens, of the kind in our living rooms. Broadcasters love stuff that has to be viewed live, like football and evictions. If some of the TV experience relied on live multimedia action then they might be able to hang on a bit longer to those linear schedules that they love so much. If you know you'll enjoy something more live, you are more likely to watch it live. Doesn't matter if the enjoyment comes from not knowing the result or from a richer experience. And then they can sell more ads around it.

Personally I think that that is all a case of decline management in the long term, but it did make me think some more about the CNN/Facebook Connect linkup. If you could friend characters from a TV show and get live updates on your phone's Facebook app, giving you more insight into what a character is thinking..... we could do that now, and it doesn't need an internet enabled TV (although of course if we had one of those then the internet is our oyster....).

Of course, for those programme marketers who actually want to increase engagement with their shows rather than simply sell more advertising (reputation vs ratings anyone?) there is also the prospect of doing this more openly on other platforms. I'm trying not to use the 'Tw' word, but this deck from Aki Spicer from Fallon is worth a look

FALLON Case Study for @_S_A_R_A_H_

View more presentations or upload your own. (tags: smbmsp fallon)

So how do you like social TV?

Welcome to the FutureWhen the idea of social viewing first started becoming reality last year, I questioned what the big social networks were doing to join in. Even then I saw it working as an application rather than through Facebook Connect, but this afternoon really highlighted the potential for integrating your social graph into your viewing. Yes, the streaming was a bit patchy, but to be fair CNN had served 13.9m streams by the end of the inauguration ceremony according to Mashable. The NY Times has some more background on the rise of social TV, and Le'Nise has lots more info.

Of course, the main benefits of Facebook Connect are all about bringing your own personal social graph into other environments. Unfortunately not many of mine were watching, so it was a straight choice between watching the constant chatter, or actually having conversations on Twitter (actually it wasn't, I was doing both). Having then gone home to watch the football though I was really begrudging of having to actually pick up my phone to text and tweet. Bring on the future!

Television: The last ten feet

I had a look back at some 'what media will look like in 2010' predictions that I wrote about 2 years ago (before I started publishing them for posterity....) to see how I was looking. Obviously the less said about my mobile industry predictions the better (I didn't see the iPhone coming, therefore I'm wrong. To be fair the same thing happened to Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Palm, so I'm in good company)

The TV views struck a few chords though, as there are a couple of wild guesses that 2009 is already starting to make reality.

By 2010 there will be no such thing as TV as a media channel
Ouch! Not something borne out by viewing figures or advertising. What I mean though is that there will be no difference between the various different screens that we have in the home. The PC screen will become outdated as we are able to stream TV directly from the internet..... yes, I know we can do that at the moment, but the spate of internet-ready TVs announced last week at CES shows that the hardware manufacturers know this is an idea whose time has come. This will allow us to cross the 'last ten feet' between the computer and the TV screen. Interestingly they all seem to be doing deals with content owners to create bespoke IPTV set-ups rather than just sticking WiFi in. So packages of Netflix, Boxee, Hulu, YouTube etc will be pre-installed, but in some cases there won't be general browsing. To do this you need to connect a computer to the back of your TV. Which for most people means either knowing how to install cards, fighting with Windows, dealing with hardware incompatability, or buying expensive Apple gear. And have big fat computers lying around in your lounge

Fortunately for those of us who can't afford Apple systems to audio-visual up our homes, it looks like Windows 7 might solve many of these problems by Not Being Shit, which is a radical departure from much of Microsoft's recent work. This will give us the possibility to simply connect the computer to the back of the TV and browse/listen/watch away. And the computer in the lounge is far less of a problem now that manufacturers are listening to what we want and making them smaller.

To be honest, I expect to see something from Apple this year that means this will soon all seem as outdated as cd shops. Don't know whether it will be Snow Leopard, a new generation of Apple TV, or iTunes as a PVR rather than a store, but this is a category so ripe for innovation that Jobs and co must be about to shake it hard.

So basically we will not talk about TV any more, because where the TV used to be will also be the internet - probably called video (?). And because TV will also be on the smaller screens in our pockets that used to be called mobile phones. I'd expect that using a much more integrated and intelligent version of the technology powering Slingbox, which beams AV content from your TV or computer to whatever device you want to view it on, that the TV and the mobile will be talking to each other. So for instance if I had been watching a football match at home but have to go out before the end, I should then be able to pick it up where I left it when I get on the train.

And what does this mean for advertising?
The current system of TV advertising is starting to buckle under the strain of increased DVR ownership. I have written in the past about why I don't think that we really understand viewing of TV ads in DVR owning households, but there is real potential in some of these technological developments to dramatically improve the role and impact of what used to be called TV advertising.

Personalised ads
The developments being made by Virgin and Sky appear to be based on behavioural targeting as well as demographic information (the danger with demographic targeting that isn't based on a BARB-style panel is that it confuses family members who are all viewers of the same screen). While not a perfect system, as the classic Tivo targeting dilemma My Tivo Thinks I'm Gay shows (link to the article text rather than the original WSJ piece, as get this, the WSJ is still subscription only. On the internet!), this is still an improvement on current TV targeting.

From a media planning perspective, there are times when I want to broadcast 30" in the old-school style. However, there are also many times when I'd prefer to have the option of showing 120" of great content to people who I know are interested in it (ideally I would know this because they had told me - by saying 'I really like the stuff this brand makes, please show me more of it as it is often better than the programmes' rather than 'I don't not allow you to not use my personal data for marketing purposes (tick here if you disagree)'. In almost all cases I'd rather invest in ads that are going to appeal a lot to fewer people than not appeal to the large number they are seen by (see Digital Mindchange for a more detailed analysis of the trade off between scale and involvement). Untargeted advertising leads to boring ads, which contributes to boring brands. As we are able to filter out more and more ads, there is no need to watch boring advertising. Personal targeting will allow more good advertising to get on air, as we all have different views of what constitutes 'good'. Adding geo-demographic data to behavioural would start to build a more rounded picture of individuals, so merging the three systems together would give us something significantly more accurate than we currently have, and should allow more enjoyable advertising to be created.
(see here for more on my thoughts on what might happen to advertising in future: it is a long post, but points 30-32 are the relevant bit)

Broadcasters
The role of the broadcasters is an interesting one in this debate. Virgin already have a lot of personal data as they know what on-demand programming has been watched by their households. As there is no reason why you wouldn't have their superfast internet access as well as their TV services, you would expect they would have rather a lot of IP data too. While Sky have been slow off the mark with advanced internet access (as their infrastructure is so satellite-based), I have a sneaky suspicision that they know more about us than they are letting on. That phone socket that runs out of the back of the Sky+ box is apparently to update the EPG. Because this can't be done over the satellite dish which is busy streaming HDTV? Sounds unlikely. In fact, when I unplugged the phoneline the EPG was just fine. In fact, it has been working just fine for a month without it! It is used to buy movies etc, but there seems to be a lot of data coming OUT of the Sky+ even when you aren't buying movies. The media planner in me hopes that this is marketable data, while the normal person in me thinks it is a bit suspicious.....

And where does that leave the terrestrial players? Let's leave Kangaroo to one side, as nearly a year after launch it still shows no signs of being out of court any time soon, and in any case is likely to have been eaten or beaten by the UK launch of Hulu when it finally does. What is interesting is that this shows that they are all able to play nice together when it suits them to do so. As ITV, C4 and Five (not too mention the commercial juggernaut that is the modern day BBC) are all missing the viewing data that Sky, Virgin and BT all have, can we expect to see them pooling data when they launch? As revenue will come from audience numbers and these are different to actual viewing habit data, maybe the answer will come with a swift reform of BARB that shares viewing data across all (ex-) terrestrial channels.

For more on this, check out Simon Kendrick from ITV's more objective take on the subject

Media Trading
The real value to broadcasters and content owners here is twofold. Firstly, if all devices are synchronised and personlised then they should be able to serve totally personalised advertising to individuals across multiple platforms: so once I have seen a set number of ads for a new product (and I mean 'seen' not 'been exposed to'. There is a fundamental difference that we don't seem to get in the UK in the way that they do in the US) then a money-off ad will be served to me the next time I'm near a suitable shop (or SMS-ed if I subscribe to a service like Blyk, or as an audio ad if I'm listening to Spotify, etc). The main point being that it doesn't matter what 'media channel' it is being served through, as everything is transmitted in the same way, and appears on either a large screen or a small one.

So far that isn't a particularly radical idea as it is only taking what ad servers do now and synchronising it across multiple screens. Where I believe media owners have a chance of making their scale relevant in the future is by assigning value to individuals. Selling large numbers of eyeballs belongs in the last century, but the thoughts behind those eyeballs are worth plenty.

WTF is he on about?

Well let's take the concept of a personal CPM, as proposed by Marian Selzman at JWT (and as I can't find a link to it, here's one from Charlene Li that refers to it). This assigns different value to individuals based on their influence across networks: how many contacts and how much online authority they have. It will no doubt be the ad model for Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect. But there are only certain categories like music and technology where this is really relevant to advertisers, and the really authoritative individuals would likely know about things that interest them before an ad agency even has a brief. However, say a broadcaster could use behavioural targeting to work out what I am likely to be buying soon, and can then sell the potential of my attention to the highest bidder. If I was starting to research buying a new car, then my price to auto brands will go through the roof. As I start comparing prices, I should only be seeing the latest discounts from all my local car dealers. They will be paying through the roof for these ads, and they will be worth every penny, as I will be interested in watching them and will imminently part with a large amount of money to the one with the best combination of product and price. However the ads for say a beer brand that I see in the same break will only cost a fraction of the price that the auto brands did. And rightly so, as my attention is worth so much less to them.

Conclusion
So I think there are enough ideas, launches and rumours coming out of CES to suggest that we will be crossing the last 10 feet in the next couple of years. We are clearly going to see the initial tests of personal targeting of 'TV' advertising, but I think that it will be very hard in future to see the difference between TV and online ads. This raises the threat for the current big players of the arrival of some much bigger ones. Those that innovate now stand a chance of maintaining a distribution and ad sales platform in the face of direct competition from Google, Apple and Microsoft, while those that don't will just be content manufacturers.

Meerkats and Virgins

'Tis the season for new ad campaigns
New year, new TV shows, new ad campaigns, hello 2009. And although the news isn't great, the quality of the advertising definitely is. You may have noticed I don't talk much about TV spots much on here, and claim that that is because I am so tech-ed up that I don't watch them. To be fair, I do watch enough to know that they are very very rarely worth talking about, so it's great when two run in the same (Celeb Big Brother..... yeah I know, but it was the first day back and I didn't fancy thinking) ad break.

Virgin Atlantic's stylish cheery recreation of the 80s stopping to scrape its jaws off the floor as Virgin 2009 walks past is not only a gorgeous visual metaphor for Virgin's 'ahead of the pack/BA' positioning when it launched, and a hat tip to how valid that position will have to be this year, but it also made me smile. On the first Monday back to work in the month of Depressing that was no small feat.
But not as much as comparing meerkats has!

This is a lovely piece of work, and you can just picture the lightbulb moment.... a brief would say something like 'undifferentiated market, low recognition and awareness - create personality and warmth', and then someone realised that 'Market' sounds a bit like 'Meerkat', especially if you say it in a Russian accent. Great concept, brave client (Disclaimer - although this is a Zed client, it's not one I work on), and top work from VCCP (see Amelia Torode's take on the VCCP view). Rick from Zed has more detail on the campaign itself.

The little touches that really made made me smile were how this idea has been carried over into other media. There is obviously a spoof 'Compare the Meerkat' site, which does allow you to compare meerkats based on size, location and sporting prowess (can't help thinking they missed a trick in not allowing you to export these to use as social network badges or even avatars. Still, hindsight is a great thing when you see 3,000 people friend a made-up character on day one of the campaign). There are multiple opportunities to reference the more traditional side of the category - £s saved on your car insurance, % of people who will save money, etc, but the tone of the ad (ie Aleksandr's frustration at being constantly asked about car insurance) allows this to be done in exactly the sort of frustrated & bored way that you or I would talk about price comparison sites, rather than the over-excited marketingese that usually passes for copywriting in these sorts of ads.

And yes, his name is Aleksandr, I know this because I'm friends with him on Facebook (along with 3,500 others), where among other things he points out upcoming TV ads, and comments on them in real time. As far as I know this is the first TV ad listing on FacebookHe also appears to be the first meerkat on Twitter - although not apparent first thing yesterday morning, he quickly joined in and started following people like me who had been tweeting about him earlier. On both networks he is acting like a human (okay, a meerkat), and talking about advertising only when asked about it (to be fair this is most of the time). He's also favouriting stuff on YouTube and becoming a fan of other FB brandsNice work too both campaigns, and thanks for cheering me up - let's hope this is the first of many 'great advertising' posts this year.

Social TV - a BBC Vision perspective

Isn't it great when you find that what you want to write has already been written by someone far more knowledgeable about a subject. I've written about how I think TV might develop using Boxee, Facebook Connect, Apple TV, XBox 360, etc, in a networked technological future, and wanted to find out a bit more (for a 'What to look out for in 2009' sort of post that may or may not happen this month). But fortunately Roo Reynolds, Portfolio Executive for Social Media at BBC Vision, has already written this - well worth checking out here

Opportunities not to see….

The rest of the family has been away for the weekend, and it’s made me realise how easy it is to write when the TV isn’t on (ok, it’s made me realise how much easier it is to write when there isn’t a baby trying to eat the laptop as well, but anyway…). If I lived in a BARB household, pretty much everything I write would be whilst I was being counted as an active TV viewer. I believe the technical Touchpoints term is concurrent consumption (ie two media channels at once). So I was in a research meeting today, talking about the relative value of TV impacts , which has historically been higher than other types of media. For example, Millward Brown studies over the years weight magazine impacts at about 60% of the value of TV impacts, because although ads in mags are more likely to be contextually more relevant than TV ads, there is also less likelihood of you actually seeing one if you have just opened up one issue. And because BARB is a more detailed and accurate survey than NRS, etc. This is before you factor in how audio-visual content has proven over the years to build emotional bonds with brands.

So that got me thinking about how we (that’s we the people, not we the media planners) are viewing TV. This is a moot point at the moment, because on the one hand TV has never had better content, never been cheaper in real terms, and in all probability will be watched even more next year when we can’t afford to go out of the house. But on the other I don’t know anyone who watches many TV ads any more. I think this is the underlying factor behind Tess Alps’s increasingly
frantic repeating of all the pluses for TV advertising that I mentioned earlier, to remind the Guardian Tech readership that, yes, some people do watch telly still. Because there is no avoiding the facts: audio-visual ads still build brands more effectively than other traditional advertising formats, broadcast TV is still the quickest route to play those ads, and it is cheaper to do so on broadcast TV than ever before.

….But….

what if more and more people are watching all of the hugely diverse quality content on TV, but not seeing the ads? Obviously we know there are plenty of Sky+ and V+ boxes out there – 17% of the country at the last count (although as the last count was made by TGI, it WAS 6 months ago). Now received wisdom is that having one of these devices means you watch more telly. I know I do. And that while you obviously record some programmes and probably skip the ads in them, the increase in amount watched is more than the total amount timeshifted. This all comes from BARB data (admittedly with a Thinkbox spin) from 2006.

Trouble is, if you test this theory on unsuspecting members of the public, they tend to laugh at you. There’s a fundamental disconnect between UK qual and all US research , which says that we don’t watch TV ads, and UK quant (and this is all BARB stuff, so proper sample sizes), which says it isn’t a problem that we need to worry about at the moment except for a few must watch dramas that are disproportionately heavily timeshifted (but where we can buy cheap ads in the on-demand version anyway). So how come there is such a perception gap?

Well the main reason is VOSDAL. Viewed On Same Day As Live. A piece of BARB terminology that dates back to the VHS era, which was designed to add as many timeshifted viewings (you remember the kind – put chunky tape in recorder, fight for half an hour to programme the thing, keep the tape for months after you’d watched it because you didn’t want to delete something that had been such bloody hard work to get onto the tape in the first place) into the overnight figures that TV buyers managed their campaigns around. All timeshifted viewing is still reported back now as either same day or later

Thing is, it isn’t that difficult to record a programme now. Personally, I like live viewing, because you can use the EPG to skip around. But if the phone rings, the baby cries, I fancy a cup of tea, whatever, I’ll hit pause. Because I can. Actually, it works even better if it’s on a commercial channel, because then there will be 9 minutes of ads every hour that will let me catch up with live again, to get my EPG back. And I'm not the only one. Everyone who has Sky+ does this. That's what it is designed for, and it is what the Sky+ ads are all about



In fact ideally, we need VOSSAL – Viewed In Same Second As Live – to have confidence in our ad campaigns. So I had a look at BARB’s FAQs and methodologies to find out what counts as VOSDAL today. Please follow the links if you can be bothered, and if you find any evidence that it has changed from the VHS days let me know, because I couldn’t. In fact, when I rang BARB, their helpdesk couldn’t tell me either. All they could do was assure me that the overnights were accurate. Now BARB is statistically extremely accurate, so I don’t doubt them. But I don’t think that they actually measure if DVR owners are watching ads. And I suspect that this might be why I get so suspicious that Thinkbox have got something to hide when they tell us that TV has never been better. It hasn't of course: we have the best telly in the UK now that any country has ever had, and it will get even better when Kangaroo launches. But the audience is up to something, and I'm not sure if BARB are able to monitor it.

White Space and Super WiFi

Somewhere hidden away beneath the election fallout last week came the news from the US that white space, the unused frequency between TV stations' analogue transmissions, is going to be freed up for use by the communications industry. The FCC ruling came after heavy lobbying from Google, who stand to benefit most from the new bandwidth as TV switches over to digital.

The main benefit for people away from their home internet connection appears to be turbocharged Wifi, broadcasting over far wider ranges and at much higher speeds than is currently possible. Obviously more time spent online means more revenue for Google, so a good short term gain for them.... The real potential for immediate step change though is what happens if these bandwidths could be used for voice calling. As Jeff Jarvis comments in the NY Post

When we can get fast bandwidth on portable devices, we can use those gadgets to do anything from making phone calls to browsing the Web.

In other words, kiss those old phones and two-year contracts goodbye and turn to new, open devices that run software from - you guessed it - Google.

Suddenly the open platform Android looks like a the consumer champion when compared to those walled garden mobile networks, not to mention the iPhone. All radical stuff, and in the run up to the analogue switch-off over here, something that is equally applicable in the UK...

Or is it? After all, public service broadcasting is a far bigger beast in the UK than the US. Surely free national turbo wifi in place of the BBC's analogue bandwidth would remove large amounts of criticism over the licence fee (especially if it was subsidised by a partnership with Google). Alternatively, with C4 negotiating for licence fee funding to maintain its public sector remit, and basing the case on the fact that they are losing valuable analogue bandwidth when they switch to digital, is there a rationale for OFCOM allowing them to keep their current bandwidth after switchover, and auction it off on the open market?

Social TV

Following on from Nick's post about CBS social viewing rooms, there's a few more bits of kit out there that are putting conversation at the heart of the viewing experience, to help drag the good ol' tellie back into the forefront of media innovation.

I'd argue that it is user experience rather than distribution speed that is the main thing preventing on demand TV reaching mass appeal. 99% of the population are happy with the big screen in the corner of the room, even if the little one on their lap gives them access to far more content. Once the content can easily move between the two, then we start to see a fully on demand viewing experience available back on the TV screen. I had expected that the hardware that will deliver this will become available (probably iTunes/Apple TV based) and have appeal outside of early adopters once Kangaroo made huge great piles of back catalogue and nostalgia available, and marketed it heavily (using iPlayer as a benchmark for my future guessing).

The obvious problem with mass take-up of on demand is that it takes away the role of TV as a conversation starter - the water cooler moment. This won't happen overnight, but it will slowly eat away at the central role that TV plays in the national psyche. Which is ironic, when brands that have historically relied on TV for advertising are starting to realise that communication might actually be a two-way process.

Gamers on the other hand have been able to converse via the TV set for years, since the launch of XBox Live in 2002. Over 60% of US owners pay the annual subscription for the service. So it is no surprise that the next release is rumoured to include a much wider range of social recommendation tools, for a range of gaming and entertainment content.

And this type of social feature is starting to make its way into the next generation of entertainment hubs - Boxee is a downloadable app that organises all the content on a PC or streamed live from the likes of Hulu. It is designed on the basis that it will be viewed on a big screen and operated via remote, and it has social recommendation at its heart - it can't actually share content with friends, but can recommend. You would expect that the next move from here is along the lines of CBS's ideas about individual groups of friends all being able to start off viewing simultaneously and comment over the TV screen.


This begs the question of whether the big social networks are missing a trick - surely Facebook TV would be a viable option? Again, it depends on having the infrastructure to deliver content to the TV screen (both the broadband distribution and the hardware in the home), but television is inherently social so the readymade friend network and app environment would give this type of application a distinct advantage.

The real trick being really missed though is gaming devices. The social element is already built in, and they already bridge the gap between laptop and TV, and there will be a huge gap in the market in the UK around Kangaroo launch time. 6 months on from Hulu launching in the US the hardware manufacturers are still chasing their tails.

Could XBox or Playstation running Kangaroo on a Facebook app be coming to a living room near you?

Dexter the Magazine

I don't know what it is about this show that brings about the best in marketers, but if you liked the genius viral for Series 2, you will love the experiential work for Series 3 in the US highlighted by Marta. Pop2Life not only created spoof 6 page Dexter issues of a range of magazines

but also set up Dexter newstands in some of the highest footfall spots in large US cities, with the full range of mags and a selection of blood red confectionery