Cause and Effect

One of the inherent problems with marketing things on the internet is that some bits of the process are very very easy to measure. That's not a problem for people who sell things online, as they can easily understand how many of them were sold and at what cost. The problems start to arise when the things being marketed are either sold elsewhere, and even more so if they are not intended to be bought immediately: if for instance the goal of the marketing is to change people's perception of a brand. Hence banners are still regularly measured on click through rates, even if the product they are advertising isn't for sale on the page being clicked through to. Clickthrough rate is clearly to wrong thing to measure in this instance but it is EASY to measure, so often taken as a proxy for less tangible results.

As brands become more interested in the social web, there is a real danger of making the same mistake again. As for many brands the social web currently means social networks (and for a large proportion of them social networks largely mean Facebook) the easy measurement tends to be numbers of Likes (/fans/followers/etc). Social networks are where people are spending more time, so brands want to be there. To justify being there, they need to measure something. Numbers of fans are easy to measure as brands and their agencies can plan, track and optimise their activity over time, and because Facebook has a straightforward advertising platform they don't have to think differently to how they always have done.

The problem with using these numbers as an objective is that no-one knows what value to attribute to them. You and I know that attributing a single value to them is meaningless, as every brand will be investing in community for different reasons and starting from different places, but that hasn't stopped a range of 'one number' valuations being put on Facebook fans. I'm going to ignore the Nielsen research published a few months ago, as I'm sure you have too if you have read more than a few lines into the introduction, but it's worth reading The Ad Contrarian's analysis of it. Syncapse's 'Value of a Fan' study is more interesting because unlike Nielsen it is genuinely empirical research - it starts from the premise of trying to things out find out, rather than trying to prove them. It also accepts that all brand communities are fundamentally different so any 'one number' can only be an average.

So in ambition and objectives it seems sound - and is worth a read (download from here). But then I get very confused by the methodology. This is a summary of the findings:Or alternatively have a look at the higher res image here. The study looks at money spent on a brand by fans and non-fans, and find that fans spend more money than non-fans.

Let's stop and think about this for a minute. A major research organisation actually thinks that it is worthy of our time and attention to know that if you like a brand, you will spend more money on it than someone who doesn't like it as much. Or put another way, brand marketing for the last 40 years works, but it's only now that we've got a survey of 4,000 Facebook users that it can finally be proved.

OF COURSE people who like a brand spend more money on it. That is A. not news and B. nothing to do with Facebook. Attributing that as value to Facebook fans is a basic misunderstanding of cause and effect. People liking brands has any number of CAUSES, of which what they do on Facebook is a tiny part. One EFFECT of their liking the brand is that they choose to sign up to receive more information from the brand, or to display their affection to their friends (this in turn may cause more people to interact with said brand, but that is not the subject of this study). Quite often people liking a brand is a result of great advertising - the best advertising makes people fans for no other reason than because the ads are so good, and one of the places that this is reflected is in social networks. Old Spice and Compare the Market saw their Facebook fans numbers increase as dramatically as their market share in response to great advertising. Both increases were therefore EFFECTS of great advertising. But to take one effect and infer a causual relationship with the other is plain wrong: so if instead of more bits of culture, Old Spice bought a load of 'become a fan' ads, this would not have the same impact on their market share. The implication of causal relationship made by this study is no different to saying that for instance:

When it snows, there are more road traffic accidents
When it snows, my toes get cold
Therefore by warming my toes up, we can reduce deaths on the road.

This confusion of cause and effect starts to lead marketers into dangerous territory - if one number can be applied to fans without questioning whether it means anything, then there is genuine justification in buying them - either by soft methods like 'Become a Fan' ads, or by harder ones like buying them on Ebay (no seriously - you can buy Twitter followers on Ebay. Fuck knows why. Check this pic courtesy of @sparkey).

Now there are lots of ways that Facebook is a great set of tools for marketers, but by buying into the cause & effect confusion we are in danger of missing the most important ones.

The end of web destinations - Facebook Open Graph slideshare deck

It doesn't seem too much of an overstatement to suggest that Facebook's Open Graph protocols have created a new OS for the internet: one that is based more on how people interact with each other than on how they relate to entertainment content. There are obviously huge issues around several of the announcements from f8 last week, centering on three subjects

Privacy (Marshall Kirkpatrick on ReadWriteWeb)
Advertising value (The Ad Contrarian on Facebook's Nielsen partnership)
(and linked to that...)
Whether Facebook can match the attention that they are gathering with a similar level of profit (Henry Blodget in Business Insider)

All three are well worth a read if you are interested in Open Graph. And if you work with brands and the internet, you are interested in Open Graph aren't you? Personally I think that Facebook has created a product with incredible potential, that will increase its revenue (although not yet up to Google level; they need another killer app for that, which i think they'll find next year) and make people's experience on the internet better. Privacy is increasingly something people are willing to trade for better. Ethically I think we're getting a bit hysterical about things, mainly because Facebook have a slightly dubious record in privacy isues, but also because they are starting to close in on Google, who are genuinely ethical in a way that few bigh corporations can be. Let's face it, they are a business who have improved what they do in order to be more profitable.

Facebook Open Graph

View more presentations from Graeme Wood.

Anyway, I've been thinking a bit about how Open Graph changes things. To be honest, the stuff in the deck was all possible with Facebook Connect if it was used in full, but very few brands were doing that. I'm not a developer so I don't know how difficult it was to implement, but by all accounts Open Graph is a whole lot easier. I'm going to follow this up once there are more distributed nodes in the graph (ie more people liking more content and more sites implementing personalised social features) and look more at the content side of the protocol.

For now this is all about how the APIs are starting to become an alternative to the web destinations of old. In order to take full advantage of all the combined benefits of the networks available to a brand, we need to start thinking about whether people have a temporary high interest in the brand, or a permanent loose interest. Then about how we move them around according to their needs and attention. And if we are going to require them to move around, how we are going to inspire them to participate. Ironically considering Facebook's change in terminology, we need to think about how we make them a fan (in the real sense of the word- not just saying they like something on a social network).

It's very early days for Open Graph, so I'd really welcome your thoughts on this deck in the comments or on Twitter

ITV, Facebook Connect and the social election

As previously mentioned, I don't know a whole lot about politics, so after writing rather to much about it in the last couple of weeks I was far more interested in how ITV covered the first leaders' debate.

The Facebook Connect commenting box was a great idea when CNN ran it for the Obama inauguration in Jan 09, but Twitter has become a lot more important since then. While there was a steady stream of live conversation from the 'everyone' feed, everyone I know who was joining in live was doing it on Twitter. Obviously that's not the same for everyone, but surely there should be both options?

Twitter sentiment analysis sort of got hidden behind the video player, which was a shame as the volume of tweets (estimated at 2000 per minute according to a comment on Question Time) meant that sheer scale should have ironed out the imperfections in automatic sentiment analysis and averaged out a realistic result.

So live opinion results that were running live at the bottom of the screen were actually from pop-up surveys on the player page - not really taking into account the amount of discussion that was taking place away from the ITV site. Judging from the dramatic fluctuation in results I'd guess sample sizes were low (although there were several sets of results in rotation the 'Who do you think has won this debate' showed Nick Clegg winning with anywhere from 43% - 81% of the vote over a rotation)



These debates are a huge opportunity for the broadcasters to aggregate and analyse the conversations taking place around their sites, and to showcase their own use of social tools to add value to their programming. If I can stay awake through the next couple then I'd like to see how the other stations fare in comparison to ITV.

And my verdict on the debate? To nick a line from @wearenorth, 'Worst. Kraftwerk. Gig. Ever."

Facebook changes attitude to data after rest of world says no

Facebook's new terms of service slunk back to the C20th this morning after Mark Zuckerberg's apology earlier in the day didn't clear the media storm around the service. It has been replaced by the old (and still highly suspicious) one as a holding position. However, this is a temporary measure until it can be replaced by this:

UPDATE FROM FACEBOOK (IN RESPONSE TO YOUR COMMENTS):
YOU OWN YOUR INFORMATION.
WE DON'T CLAIM RIGHTS TO YOUR PHOTOS OR OTHER CONTENT.
WE WON'T USE ANY INFORMATION YOU SHARE ON FACEBOOK FOR ANYTHING YOU HAVEN'T ASKED US TO.
WE WILL NOT SHARE YOUR INFORMATION IF YOU DEACTIVATE YOUR ACCOUNT.
WE APOLOGIZE FOR ANY CONFUSION AROUND THESE ISSUES.

In other news, the case against Pirate Bay pretty much collapsed on day two after the prosecution admitted they didn't understand how BitTorrent works.

Maybe we can change stuff after all. Let's start in New Zealand

Facebook's attitude to data

Mine, Mine, Mine, Mine

Facebook updated their Terms of Service today, with an amendment that has caused a lot of people to question how worthwhile their FB profile really is. Basically what has happened is that Facebook have used one of their rights as set out in the ToS to change any term that they want to, with no warning or right of appeal. That shouldn't cause anyone any problem, as you all knew they had this right from when you read the ToS back when you signed up, right? Oh.

And the term that they have decided to change is this: it used to say

You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof

but importantly it also used to add this:

You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.

That bit has been removed and replaced with this:

The following sections will survive any termination of your use of the Facebook Service: Prohibited Conduct, User Content, Your Privacy Practices, Gift Credits, Ownership; Proprietary Rights, Licenses, Submissions, User Disputes; Complaints, Indemnity, General Disclaimers, Limitation on Liability, Termination and Changes to the Facebook Service, Arbitration, Governing Law; Venue and Jurisdiction and Other.

So the amendment seems to have changed things from 'we can do what we want with your data until you tell us to stop', to 'we can do what we want with your data forever and you better get used to it'. This is obviously a concern, particularly for for example for musicians who post their tunes and videos on FB - not only is any content posted automatically the property of Facebook, but this amendment removes any way of regaining it by leaving the network.

Personally I think that there is not enough use of Facebook as a creative community that this change has been made to steal and licence content, and it clearly won't be now, as artists and musicians will surely revert to networks offering fair usage terms. It does raise a question about data and the internet though. The C20th record label business has fought for ten years to continue to 'own' data that costs nothing to store or distribute, It also refers regularly to people stealing content by using P2P networks and BitTorrent, and as of today is back in court in Sweden trying to close down PirateBay for breach of copyright on a global scale.

Although on the one hand you have an out-of-date business model trying to stem the inevitable flow of data into the public domain, and on the other a behemoth of the internet age struggling to live up to its venture capital billing, these cases are similar. If data is free and in the public domain, then anyone can use it for whatever reason. If we put a caveat on that such as 'whatever legal reason', then the record companies are in the right, as copyright is part of all [western] legal systems. If we support PirateBay, then the argument follows that Facebook can have all the pretty pictures that we have given them of our own free will and do what they want with them.

And by and large I think I agree with the second part - if we choose to hand over data rights in return for a really really easy way to share it with our friends, then we shouldn't be overconcerned about what Facebook does with it. With the very very important addition that we should also be able to ask for that right back at any point. So up till now Facebook data rights has been a fair trade - I wouldn't upload my own music on there, but I can see the cost/benefit if I did. But now it seems suspicious.

Still not sure about whether it is any worse that what we've done to record companies - however, I also don't care, as they profiteered from me and every other music fan for 50 years (actually only about 25 for me specifically - I'm not THAT old). And that is the other important point, because at the end of the day this isn't something that is going to be ruled on by a judge or a barrister. If Facebook has gone too far here, we will be the judge. We will either use it or not use it - another bit of breaking news today showing how it can be done: the campaign against New Zealand's repressive copyright laws shows both the depth of feeling and the impact of having @stephenfry get behind your campaign. And I think that that is the difference - no-one will line up to save the record business because no-one cares. They were just a middleman. The difference is not one between data being free or owned, it is between people caring and not caring. If we care about data privacy, we will use the network that Facebook has created to make a change (as seen in Beacon), in the same way that data has fought to be free of the clutches of the record industry. If not, then it probably wasn't that important.
(Hat tips to Mashable and Stephen Fry for sources)

Cigarettes and Alcohol

We tend to avoid the issue in this industry. We call things 'sticky' or 'engaging', when what we are really trying to do is invent stuff that is utterly addictive. So music really helped (see every kids' cereal ad ever). Now 'advertising' can be applications that make people's lives easier, we should be trying to create things that you really can't live without, things that compete with the best applications that aren't 'advertising'. This got me thinking about how applications become addictive. Facebook is a bit like alcohol: it facilitates social interaction, its all really good fun, but you don't want to spend all your time there after you finish Uni. First reactions to Twitter tend to be more like those of a first cigaratte; people don't see what all the fuss is about. It takes a bit of practicing to understand why people do it, and by the time you've put that effort in, you realise that you can't live without it. Not because it does anything flashy - it isn't a Saturday night site, it's a quick break from work for 5 minutes site. Break after break after break. I'm not suggesting that we should build another Twitter, rather that thinking small, building little things brilliantly, is the lesson that I'm learning as I explore Twitter.

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!

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.

Online Advertising 101 - This Ad is Annoying

Advertising with my own money....
With all the possibilities that have opened up over the last few years for brands to join in conversations, I sometimes forget that the economics underpinning the biggest social networks are still all about eyeballs, scale and broadcasting. So, selling display ads! I saw a presentation earlier this week talking about the success or otherwise of running traditional advertising on Facebook: now most people would say that this isn't the best way of using Facebook as an advertiser, but while there are millions of people using it there will also be lots of DR campaigns chasing their eyeballs and wallets. Interrupting people with commercial messages while they are chatting to their mates is no different from selling cheap DVDs table to table in the pub, but there is clearly money to be made in that as well, because people do it. And it is the same on Facebook: if the ads are cheap enough then it doesn't matter how few people notice them.

And they are really cheap - actually really really cheap: starting at around $0.10 CPM (as all Facebook ads are priced in US$). Now don't have much experience of direct response text ads on Facebook, so when I heard this, I thought it might be worth while having a go.... put something provocative together, stick $15 behind it, and that would get me about 150,000 page impressions.

So what do I have to advertise? Well, it might also be useful to see what the people who noticed the ads thought of them, so I came up with this:

This ad is crap.
Does crap advertising on your profile page annoy you? I work for an advertising agency that puts them here. Tell me where we're going wrong.

So a lucrative sideline in copywriting clearly awaits.... Not surprisingly this wasn't accepted, because those polite souls who run Facebook don't allow offensive language in ads (this surprised me at the time considering what content is on Facebook, but what doing this has taught me is that each user of the site will set the content at a level they feel happy with by choosing who their friends are. Advertisers want to reach everyone, so have to be more careful. More on this later). So I changed it to this:

This ad is annoying.
Does annoying advertising on your profile page annoy you? I work for an advertising agency that puts them here. Tell me where we're going wrong.

And I set up a WordPress blog called This Ad Is Crap as a landing page giving a bit more information. The rationale for hiding my identity, and claiming in the personal information that this could get me into trouble if I was found out was to try and create a bit more of an undercover feel - that anyone reaching the page might feel more like they were part of a secret project. (rather than being part of a cynical piece of research - not sure if my rationale is correct or ethical, but that was the reason).

After having to remove all references to Facebook from the landing page ('breach of copyright' apparently), my ad was accepted. I targeted all adults 18-35 in the UK, and bid $0.10 CPM with a daily cap of $5. In retrospect I should have spotted that there was a CPC option as well, but this was a bit of a rushed job...

And sat back to see if anyone noticed it. My view is that this is a slightly different ad from what you normally see there, so I was expecting a 'good' clickthrough rate. 'Good' in these sort of environments means 0.01% (or an Ignorethru rate of 99.99%). So a click target of 15 ($1 per click). However my inept attempt at a landing page, and the fact that I was asking people to offer their thoughts in the comments, would probably mean very few actually commented. So these are the results:
29 clicks, 167,582 impressions, at a CPC of $0.51. And one comment. Considering lack of image in copy, dodgy landing page, all the online adverting 101 stuff that I would tell anyone doing it for the first time and didn't get round to myself, not a bad job. This shows why so many direct response advertisers are there, as it is so very cheap that it doen't matter if hardly anyone actually notices the ad. If you actually have something interesting to say or sell (rather then just being a smartarse like me) then this is a great system, particularly if the targeting is accurate: I didn't make too much use of targeting here, but that might well be a test to play around with next year if I ever have $15 going spare in 2009.

It is also interesting to think about when talking to people who think their 'web 2.0' project on Facebook means that they are participating in social media. I now have a case study paid out of my own pocket that says that just catching someone's attention while they are with their friends with an ad that is a bit different doesn't mean that they will the spend any time joining in with what the destination site wants them to do.

And although one comment is very far from representative, it is certainly an interesting perspective, and one that has made me reconsider my cynical reaction to my initial ad not being accepted.

Anyway, back to spending other people's money armed with a few new opinions.....

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

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?

The 8th Mass Media - how does that work?

Been thinking about this one for a while, and this isn't the right answer (it is just a view on what there will still be for a buying agency to take commission on in 10 years time), but it is a better question than the ones that ITV seem to be asking themselves at the moment.

Ok, so if the 7th Mass Media is mobile, as Tomi & Alan have explained, then the 8th will be Us. The theory is David Cushman's, and it isn't just another big up to UGC: it isn't the content that defines Us as a new media channel, it is the fact that people are now a distribution medium with equivalent broadcast potential to the other mass media. This can change the game, as content producers have traditionally funded production by monetising distribution.

Now, soon after reading a post related to this, I had one of those random chain emails forwarded from a friend promising me lots of money. You know the kind: someone, usually Microsoft, are experimenting with viral emailing, and will pay you a certain amount for each person that you forward this on to, and then more for everyone they forward it on to. Pretty basic pyramid selling scamology, which only works because it comes from a friend, it is easy to ignore, and you don't want to be the one who misses out if it does come true one day.

Thing is, at the time I was looking for more details on a new report on PVRs that had just been published by Oliver Wyman Research. This suggests that across the US, UK and Japan, 85% of PVR owners skip at least 75% of all TV advertising. This will come as no surprise to anyone who owns a Sky+ box - i know i can't remember the last time I watched a TV ad anywhere other than YouTube. However if you are an advertiser who relies on impartial advice from their media agency (who make their money from commision from TV advertising) or the marketing press, in articles based on research from, if not actually written by, Thinkbox (who make their money from....oh) then you could be forgiven for thinking that hardly anyone wants to avoid those beautiful expensive 30" spots.

That got me thinking about whether the pyramid spam is a viable medium. Not through email, but as a means to monetise the huge scale that Facebook et al have built over the last few years. What if we could incentivise people to watch our ads through a pyramid commission structure? If you can make £0.01 per view of an ad that you have forwarded, not just by the people you have forwarded it on to, but by everyone else downstream of them, then all those 1p's will add up. In fact, if everyone forwards it on to 10 people, who forward it on to 10 people, then by level 8 we have 100m ad impacts at £1.11 per thousand.

This could maybe split down between the network (ie the people who view content and share it) and the platform that they share it on (social network or whatever), but the really neat part is that £0.01 really isn't that much. So if the content isn't any good, no-one will be missing out on much by not forwarding it to anyone.Which will reward innovative, risk-taking advertising. So it is really short-form branded entertainment (a bit like a viral really, but with a kick start), which is good because it will stop rumours about the death of advertising, and help speed up the death of bad advertising, which is a much better idea.

Like I said, this isn't a right answer, but it's an interesting question.....

Person David Cushman's

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Facebook (for Pirates)

One of the less obvious features of 'New Facebook" is the language settings, which seems to have been opened up to app developers the same way as the rest of the site. Because you can now see your FB profile in English (Pirate). And Facebook becomes a load more interesting if you can scour the horizon for what yer hearties arrrrr doin'. (grog fests particularly)

so 'search' becomes 'scour', 'poke' becomes 'skewer', etc. Unfortunately none of this shows up in your public profile, so the novelty might wear off....eventually