1. The mobile is personal.
2. The mobile is the first always-on mass media.
3. The mobile is the first always-carried mass media.
4. The mobile is the first mass media with a built-in payment mechanism.
5. Mobile uniquely offers the media audience the input tool, at the point of creative impulse.
Mobile is also quoted as being the most misunderstood of all media.
Reprise Media was recently invited to participate in Google’s “Study of Advertising across Traditional Media”, a 15 minute survey asking questions like, “Do you use the same advertising/marketing agency across all advertising channels?”, “What is the average cost per ad of running your ads in each of the following channels?” and “How does your company (or client) measure and evaluate the effectiveness of TV, Newspaper, and Radio advertising?”
In an attention focussed economy reputation is everything for a brand. Through the study of open creative communities we can begin to understand the importance of brand identity. There is less worse as being seen as indistinct, boring or unpopular within the critical environment and boundaries of a community. For a brand to successfully market within a neo-tribal like community it has to first understand that the “barrier to entry is creative citizenship, you are either a citizen or a participant or you are NOT” Source Remarkk.
Your participation is based on your relationship to that group of people be it on a local or global community basis, both will need to be addressed. As Mark Kuznicki puts it an Open Community does not necessarily mean equal individuals (players), the organisation of a community lies deeply rooted within actual social human behaviour or interaction with the environment and therefore also your brand. When a participant with skill, ability and willingness engages your brand and recommends others within that community to engage, you are or are on the way to building a reputation. There exist individuals with a certain status within a community whose leadership is legitimized through their reputation and skill. It is possible that consumers belong to many ‘tribes’ simultaneously. “We are much more than the roles and demographic slices that our companies, families and mass media would want to trap us into” (Source)
So how do you survive in a reputation economy?
In the book Leading the Revolution: How to Thrive in Turbulent Times by Making Innovation a Way of Life By Gary Hame discusses the LVMH retail chain Sephora, a highly successful business innovation concept. At Sephora the cosmetic brands lose their control over sales, product display and merchandising. Perfumes are lined up in alphabetical order along the walls; cheaper brands are displayed next to big expensive names.
The very competitive differentiation these brands relied upon does not exist at Sephora and it does neither in a reputation economy. The crux of this business concept is the ability and boldness to apply themselves to an innovation strategy within the retail branch. In advertising it is similar.
“What is not different is not strategic”.
Today we do not attack the competition, to be successful, we avoid the competition altogether just like Sephora who has left the traditional department store cosmetic counters begging for customers…..and no free gifts or discounts are given at Sephora.
Advertisers who experiment with innovation and cultivate change are successfully building reputations, those who do not, will always have a hard time keeping up their appearance.
Thanks to New Media Maze I have been forced to face the fact that my talents do not extend to the science of making great wine. Apparantly my Pinot Noir is two years too old and of disputable quality. However I may try this again just to learn the one or two essential things about winemaking which during my education, were not considered important for a young lady to learn about. I have to agree with Dave here that I am however very good at drinking the stuff.
Try out this sweet new viral campaign produced for the launch of the DVD of ‘A good year’ by Fox. A movie which I can’t even remember hitting the cinemas yet.
Your audience is gone what you are left with are participants.
If there is just one thing I could tell advertisers this year about their role in Web 2.0 it would sound something like this ” Content creators need to understand and respect and value the role of aggregators to help them find an audience. Further, they need to understand how Personalized Aggregation (based on Attention) changes the publisher/audience dynamic.”
As you may have experienced sitting in on a focus group discussion, participants have opinions and different tastes. One participant may have completely different expectations from a product than the other. On the web consumers want highly personalized experiences but on the other hand this experience needs to be delivered in a format which makes sense to them. Currently we are presented with an overload of information and ways to find it. A massive misunderstanding of Web 2.0 is that you get to clutter my life with a million brightly coloured chiklets.
“When faced with information overload we will need to understand how to grab the consumer attention. By measuring one’s Attention you can learn what they are interested in. By learning what they are interested in you can learn what content they want to see more of. From there, it’s a hop, skip and a jump to connecting content creators with participants”….or advertising to consumers.
Search engines document and archive the web then role it out in any old format i.e. PDF, html, word, flash and that is fine but the preferred delivery formats will change in the wake of RSS. Understanding the new attention economy means being able to reformat delivery in a way which is de cluttered, intuitive and is tuned into your tribal space and even that of your nana’s bridge club participants.
I scan through at least 500 articles and blog posts a week to pick out a few which grab my attention which I then review and perhaps reformat in a way I believe will catch your interest . However how do I know you are actually going to take the time to read these posts ? With the amount of information pushed out in front of you on a daily basis I will have to forgive your attention deficit for missing out on these few posts I made on my blog this week.
“Attention Deficit is a phenomenon that occurs at watershed moments in publishing. It occurred when TV went from 3 to 300 channels. It occurred when the internet reduced the cost of publishing and it is occurring again as social/time-shifted media takes root in the main stream.”
So if you did happen to read this post you will now be on the cutting edge of the web, at the threshold of the launch of something rather big namely the ‘attention management engine’. Its like VCR was for TV, Search Engines were to the Internet. The attention management engine works out the personal relevancy and degree of importance of an item of information or content and then feeds it to you in a way which will grab your attention be it as a Desktop alert, news ticker, screen popover/up, SMS, mobile alert: YOU decide.
Touchstone is an Australian company currently running a beta test of one of very few applications using the virtues of RSS (XML) and formats information in a way even your grandmother could understand. To do this they use a protocol called APML (Attention Profiling Mark-up Language ) this is an XML file that contains an outline of ‘Implicit and Explicit interests and Sources Rankings by Device and Profile’. Fred Wilson and I share our view on RSS.
“To hit the mainstream] RSS has to become brain dead simple to use”. - Fred Wilson - Touchstone
However it seems this could be taken a step further and a combination of something called Liquid Lists (see video demo below) using Touchstone’s Attention Management Engine could completely redefine the way you are using the internet today. It could in fact integrate with what some analysts are calling your ‘lifestream’ which is basically the footprints you leave on the web or for that matter any digital platform which is able to record or track your presence.
Sam Sethi is the founder of the start up Liquid Lists. Sam has already started work on another start-up called Liquid Lists which focuses on helping people discover information based on their “attention” and that of people in their trusted social network. Liquid Lists is an example of the next generation of semantic “real-time” web applications. He believes that people will want to be able to share their ‘lifestream’ data with others.
“Of course you aren’t going to want to share with just anybody. Now by combining multiple ‘lifestreams’ you will be able to discover what’s hot or not (places to go, music to hear, video to watch) a bit like a personal recommendation based on the behaviour of you friends attention.”
Obviously you aren’t going to want to share this personal data with just anybody save perhaps your family members and close friends. However in light of the trend ‘connecting lifestyle’s the information you leave with your digital footprint could even be used to define who wants to go out with you. This is what social networking 2.0 is all about, who you connect to and who wants to connect to you.
Check back tomorrow when I tell you what I think this means for advertisers.
In the late 90’s when I was working in the travel tech industry the idea of XML standard protocol was seen as something of a holy grail. Parsing traveler data between various reservation systems was complicated business especially as legacy and proprietary reservation systems were incompatible and could not communicate with each other without days of screwing around with their database connectivity by expensive engineers.
It was therefore that seamless packaging of different elements of travel near impossible. It wasnt until the early years of this decade that the first online travel booking engine claimed to be able to parse traveler data thru various reservation systems and end up with what we liked to call the Super PNR. It was a true breakthrough in travel technology and disrupted the complete travel industry. It couldn’t have been done without XML.
I was on the co-founder board of a true multimillion dollar travel startup in London during the late 90’s. XML was on our minds too but there was no way that the OPT (the advisory board set up by leaders in the travel industry aiming to set standards in XML for the industry) was going to work as fast as we were ambitious….so we started building a X million dollar travel booking engine with multiple data connections to suppliers all over the world…
THANK GOD it was all over because of a misjudgment in our break-even date, 10 instead of 5 years, meant a lot for a start up in those days (still does now by the way)!
XML and me have usually had a long distance relationship, I usually try to stay away from code in general and it has been very thankful for that most of the time. This was until I read a rather alarming article on one of the Dutch blogs last week.
Apparently 70% of the Dutch population has no idea what RSS is and not to mention XML/XSL of course. I thought what a pity, all these people cannot enjoy the same organized online lifestyle as me and more worrying, aren’t we missing lots of marketing opportunities here!? Of course, to this 70% the internet must still seem a daunting mess with only perhaps the likes of Google or Yahoo to help them find their ways through the rubble of internet past to internet future, they are missing out on finding out where the true power of the internet lies. However since we, who are in on the RSS secret aren’t being paid to tell anyone else, that’s where the story ends..
Or is it? In a rather benevolent streak I figured out a very simple solution for all these people and you may find it correctly displayed in the right side bar of this page below the links (if you don’t your browser probably has a problem with the iframe).
If you follow this link you will end up at a page which frankly looks very much the same as this block. However if you view the source of this file it should be very clear to you that this is just another basic RSS file written in XML.
It took me all of two days to get it all figured out but I am quite proud of the results and of its potential. The people who did answer they knew of RSS in the above Dutch survey thought it very much belonged to the geeky grey area of internet.
The appearance of the RSS feeds seem to be the most intimidating of all. This is what gave me the incentive to get onto the coding stool and produce the NEW and FRIENDLY RSS feed!
I experimented with many sizes and formats but I especially like the banner sized ones. Now really anyone can start there own ad network or just use them as a smart way to exchange or syndicate content whilst branding them in your own special interface!
The skyscaper banner feed on the right is a feed from one of my Dutch community websites Dolcevia.com. So there you have your daily Italian recipe courtesy of me!
Here is another fine example of how Second Life could offer a channel for advertisers and the entertainment industry. Doppelganger Inc. has just launched Tyra’s Virtual Studio.The agency Doppelganger develops avatar-based virtual worlds, the first of which was the contained virtual world ‘The Music Lounge’.
Tyra Banks is a ex miss America and national celebrity in the US as host of the popular show ‘America’s Next Top Model’ and her own talk show.
It is a virtual world where your cell shaded avatar can hang out and get insider information on the Tyra Banks Show. The virtual world recreates the set of Tyra’s talk show, and features “exclusive events like fierce runway challenges.” It is worthwhile to check out the website which offers more information on the events planned in the contained virtual studio.
Mini has a aquired quite a reputation as one of the favourite innovative advertisers out there. This new campaign which launched in major US cities this week ny their US advertising agency Butler, Shine, Stern and Partners is yet another where they prove their ability to wow consumers using innovation and creativity.
“MINI of BMW is using advanced technology to communicate directly with drivers through talking billboards called MINI Motorby. Instead of seeing billboards with the same mind-numbing casino ad, these boards feature a changing array of unique, personal and unexpected messages which are triggered by the MINI owner utilizing Radio Frequency Identification Technology (RFID)—the same kind used in passports and credit cards. The billboards generate customized content to owners carrying active RFID tags in real-time, using information provided by the owners. Messages will be spelled out in lights on billboards in New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Miami locations.” Coolhunting.com
“This is the ultimate one-to-one creative execution, and it’s perfectly aligned with everything we’re trying to do with MINI,” said John Butler, Executive Creative Director and Founding Partner at Butler, Shine, Stern and Partners, MINI USA’s ad agency. “
I am really quite excited about the claims this virtual call centre company makes (the things I get excited about nowadays is even surpising me).
“Distributed call-center outsourcing service LiveOps has announced the closure of a Series C round of funding for $28 Million. The round was lead by Benchmark Capital, a new investor in the company and a fund that rarely makes later stage investments. Benchmark’s investments in the consumer space, which more readers here may be familiar with, include Pageflakes, Bebo and Yelp among others.”
“Palo Alto based LiveOps offers web based management of more than 10,000 home based telephone workers. Here’s what makes them interesting: their service operates as a performance based auction, routing incoming calls to the best performing worker available. Top workers participate in IM communities to discuss methods of increasing productivity and solving problems. “
To prove how confident this company is, they will go head to head with any other call center, and publish the results - win or lose ! This sounds like a no cure no pay challenge. I am looking forward to taking them up ton the challenge so during the course of the next weeks I will be putting this service to the test. Check back for my results.
Reprise Media was recently invited to participate in Google’s “Study of Advertising across Traditional Media”, a 15 minute survey asking questions like, “Do you use the same advertising/marketing agency across all advertising channels?”, “What is the average cost per ad of running your ads in each of the following channels?” and “How does your company (or client) measure and evaluate the effectiveness of TV, Newspaper, and Radio advertising?”
In an attention focussed economy reputation is everything for a brand. Through the study of 
Thanks to 
Here is another fine example of how Second Life could offer a channel for advertisers and the entertainment industry.
Mini has a aquired quite a reputation as one of the favourite innovative advertisers out there. This new campaign which launched in major US cities this week ny their US advertising agency 
“Palo Alto based LiveOps offers web based management of more than 10,000 home based telephone workers. Here’s what makes them interesting: their service operates as a performance based auction, routing incoming calls to the best performing worker available. Top workers participate in IM communities to discuss methods of increasing productivity and solving problems. “
RSS
