Tim Youngman - The Market(ing) Gardener

Lack of marketing budget? Time to think smarter

2011-11-04T02:12:00.001-07:00

Many of you may have seen the recent furore about the number of ad breaks in the X Factor and the current series of Downtown Abbey. Many have complained how the sheer volume of ad breaks and sponsorship slots was ruining their enjoyment of the programmes. I will leave you to decide whether that is either possible or true.

I suspect though that along with concerned of Surbiton there may have been a few individuals either watching the shows or reading about the controversy who simply wished they could afford that level of marketing. Lets put it this way, the estimated cost for a 30 second slot in the final of X Factor last year was in excess of £250,000 and that is without the cost of making the ad in the first place. So this style of advertising is just for the big boys with big pockets which makes it difficult for a local advertiser to stand out.

So if you are a small company looking to promote its products on a tight budget how do you compete with the big boys? The answer is you have to think smart.

My favourite two examples of this are from very different industries. The first is from Scottish brewer Brew Dog who have made a name for themselves not on the basis of its beers but for its ability to get a lot of coverage by being clever. They launched a beer described as the "UK's Strongest beer", Tokyo beer, at an incredible 18.2% abv.

This created a huge backlash from a number of alcohol issue related charities and bodies concerned over the need and glamorisation of such a high strength beer. I suspect though that they have missed the point. This launch has nothing to do with selling a few bottles of beer and everything to do with gaining profile for Brew Dog. In fact they only brewed 3,000 bottles as a special edition. In reality over 29 millions barrels of beer are sold in the

every year. You can now see brewdog beers in most supermarkets, a big win for a small company.

My other favourite example is from American clothing company Betabrand (www.betabrand.com). Like the drinks industry, fashion is dominated by big brands and big retailers so its very difficult for a small online only brand to standout. The founder of Betabrand knew he had to come up with something different so last year they created the seven deadly sins series of trousers. It started with the “Gluttony Pants” which included three expander buttons labelled piglet, sow and boar. Trousers were then created for each sin. For envy for example they created just one unique pair of trousers for an auction so others would envy the winner.

Clever idea, clever product and clever marketing generated social media and press coverage and took sales to over $1m in just a couple of years. With ongoing product innovations such as horizontal cord trousers and trousers with reflective turn ups for cyclists they continue to carve a name for themselves in a difficult market place.

Sometimes it does not take millions thrown at marketing to make a brand. It takes creativity, thought and perseverance and a good product to start with.

Tim Youngman is head of digital marketing for Archant follow him on twitter @timyoungman

The business of gaming

2011-10-10T08:40:00.000-07:00

In a week when we move into autumn along with the cheery message that there is a 1 in 6 chance of a double dip recession one media moves into its biggest profit generating season. You might be forgiven if you think that the most profitable media in the world is television with its ad revenues or film with its takings and merchandise, in fact, its gaming.

Consoles such as the Nintendo Wii moved gaming from the bedroom of the teenage boy to the family lounge. Gaming has moved into a more mainstream environment but the names of the big autumn releases: Gears of War 3, Modern Warfare 3, Battlefield 3 give the game away, so to speak, of where the real money lies.

Lets take the most anticipated game release of this year, Modern Warfare 3, part of the Call of Duty series. This will mean nothing to most of you however the last game in the series; Call of Duty Black Ops, sold 5.6 million copies on the first day of release last November in the

and US alone. Since then it has gone on to sell over 25 million copies worldwide in just 10 months with a launch price on average of £40.

The Call of Duty titles are created and owned by publisher Activision Blizzard. This one games publisher in 2010 posted revenues of $4.8 billion with a 29% operating margin. It had $1.4 billion operating cash flow with a total of $3.5 billion of cash and investments and no debt. The Call of Duty games alone brought Activision $1.2 billion in 2010. They also made $1.7 billion in digital revenues from online subscriptions to web based games such as World of Warcraft and also map packs for games. These allow gamers who play others online to buy new digital worlds to shoot each other in and with 20m worldwide sold of a Black Ops extension pack at an average of $10-$15 per sale you can see how it ads up.

They are not alone Electronic Arts which publishes the Battlefield series and the Sims among others reported $3.8 billion in revenues for the year ending March 2011. These are just two of the bigger publishers and this does not account for the revenues gained for Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo for their multiple console sales. It is now, undeniably, a massive industry but how has it moved from teenage boy’s bedrooms to one of the worlds most profitable industries?

Gaming recently enjoyed its own series on BBC Four and therein lies the clue. I first played with a Spectrum 48k when I was in high school. Many a Saturday afternoon was lost playing such classics as Manic Miner or Sabre Wulf. That generation, who were brought up on the Specturm and Commodore 64, grew up and graduated to the Playstation and the X Box. Then, games were bought by saving pocket money. Those 1980s teenagers are now in their 30’s and 40’s and can now afford the £40 cost of a new game, albeit wincing when paying. The gaming industry has been accused of many things, but with enviable revenues and profits and a growing market a double dip recession is not a concern for those involved.

Tim Youngman is head of digital marketing for Archant follow in on Twitter @timyoungman

Cheese, cigarettes and brand architecture

2011-08-18T08:13:00.000-07:00

Question, what has Philadelphia Cheese and Marlboro Lights got in common.

Answer, well you need to read on and I will explain later.

Some stories, unlike this column, do not need a hook to keep readers interested and some stick around for longer than people first thought they would. The best current example of this is the phone hacking scandal. This seems to have dragged on forever, but it has done because every time you think it will die down something else comes out that beggar’s belief.

I am sure that you all will have read or watched ad nauseum details of this scandal. Most interesting to me however was that this story has moved from something affecting a single newspaper to something affecting a global corporation.

So back to the question of what has Philadelphia Cheese and Marlboro Lights got in common? The answer is that at one point they were both owned by the same holding company, Phillip Morris. This is the point with global companies, they can own vastly different products and brands, contentious and otherwise, and the general public never know.

So now a brief lesson in brand architecture, or the way that companies structure brands they own. You can have product brands such as pampers, sub brands such as Cadbury’s Dairy Milk and also corporate/umbrella brands such as Virgin. These are the most dangerous as if something goes wrong with one part, as the others are so closely associated with it, it can affect the others. So if Virgin Money were to suffer a major issue it might creative a negative perception on other Virgin brands i.e. Rail, Atlantic etc. This has not stopped some previously relatively unknown corporate brands start to make themselves known such as Proctor and Gamble with its “proud sponsor of mums” campaign in readiness making the most of its Olympic activities.

A house of brands approach however is the complete opposite. Here a relatively unknown parent brand owns lots of very disparate sub brands and if one gets in trouble, it is unlikely to be associated with another and the holding company. So when the News of the World got in trouble you may have realised that it could affect The Times or The Sun as they are all part of News International. But what about Fox News, or any of the 120 newspaper News Corporation, the overall parent company, own in

Australia

alone and I could go on.

What has been most interesting is that the focus and talk around phone hacking has moved from individual product brands to the ultimate owner News Corporation and more and more the largest shareholders the Murdoch’s themselves. The enquiries may be looking at specific products but media coverage and social media chatter now generalises about News Corp as a whole, something that has a house of brands it probably thought would never happen. With the News Corp BSkyB bid gone and the scandal ongoing, no matter how clever you run your corporate affairs, sometimes a single event can pull the critical piece from the Jenga tower and we wait to see if it will all fall down.

Tim Youngman is head of digital marketing for Archant – follow him on twitter @timyoungman

Copywriting for sales materials - less is often more

2011-07-11T02:52:00.000-07:00

In the last month I have been at both the Suffolk County Show and the Norfolk Show. Of course Archant Towers are heavily involved supporting our local county shows but we are of course at them as well selling lots of newspapers. This year we also had people signing people up to our new Tickles offering, which sends out daily emails of local money saving offers, at both shows.

After coming back from two very long but fruitful days at the Norfolk show I sat nursing sore legs and a large mug of tea thinking about what others were doing at the show. Walking around, you get to see the wonderful and rather creative ways people describe what they do. I also have a habit of picking up sales brochures at shows like that. It was not that I was interested in these businesses, but it is a great opportunity to collect examples of sales materials and branding aids from different industries to see if there any ideas I could steal, sorry I meant learn from.

So while trying to regain feeling in my legs, I flicked through a large pile of brochures I had picked up as I walked around the packed show. It came apparent that most were created by people who run with the adage “why use 3 words when you can use 300”. The words, innovative and trusted company were used by at least a half a dozen of them. Few actually told me what they would deliver to me as a potential customer in a concise and easy to remember format that would stand them apart from their competitors.

Sales materials, especially sales brochures, are often beautiful things packed with words that potential customers simply don’t read. This is mainly as the person who wrote them either was under instruction from his or her manager to make sure that they include all the benefits and descriptive text they think should be in there (forever known and The Crammer). Or because they think that with 4 pages of a brochure to fill you should fill it even if it means long winded descriptions and lots of flowery text that says lots and yet nothing at the same time.

Only one company of all the brochures I picked up described in 4 concise words what they did and stood for. That simple statement set them apart and drew me into its literature which itself was concise well designed and well written. Whoever created that had sat back and taken time to think through what key messages they were trying to communicate to its potential customers and then delivered them clearly and concisely.

Creative writing and design is an art and writing concisely is a skill, ask any journalist or columnist who has to stick to 500 words. So if you are thinking about creating something to promote your business think about what you are trying to convey and remember in this case, less is often more.

Tim Youngman is head of digital marketing for Archant follow him on twitter @timyoungman

Social Media and its key role in moden news delivery

2011-05-09T03:20:00.000-07:00

There were two worldwide major media events since my last column that you cannot have failed to have seen. The first was the royal wedding and the second, the death of Osama Bin Laden. Both were fascinating stories for very different reasons and both garnered worldwide media coverage. What was interesting though was the role that social media played in that media coverage.

Over 400m people watched the royal wedding on a dedicated YouTube channel. Not as high as the estimated 2bn television audience but still staggering. During the service, according to Facebook, its users were posting 47 updates a second. As I watched the television coverage, on both channels correspondents pushed their own twitter accounts (I don’t think the BBC or ITV had thought about keeping it to an official profile that they owned rather than a following that moves with the presenter). As Philip Schofield constantly was tweeting live on TV and reading tweets I sat and wondered if Twitter especially had gone mainstream. That was of course until the events of last Sunday night.

The death of Osama Bin Laden by American Special Forces has now been touted as Twitter’s CNN moment. That refers back to the first Gulf war two decades ago when the cable networks 24 hour news coverage brought 24 hours news to mainstream attention and arguably changed the face of news reporting. The story was first unofficially broken by Sohaib Athar (@ReallyVirtual on Twitter) who inadvertently tweeted the whole raid as he lived nearby, commenting on helicopters and explosions and then the now famous “Uh oh, now I’m the guy who live blogged the Osama raid without knowing it.”. It was then done more officially by the former chief of staff for Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary under President George W Bush. "So I'm told by a reputable person they have killed Osama Bin Laden. Hot damn." he wrote at 10.25pm EST Sunday evening. After that it went round the world, within 35 minutes by 11pm EST, Bin Laden news was being tweeted at the rate of 5,106 tweets per second.

It’s this speed of breaking news that is the real change. In 1952 it took 2 days for news of the Lynmouth flood disaster to break. By 1988 the Piper Alpha explosion was reported an hour after it happened. By the time the plane landed on the Hudson River in NY in Jan 2009 it was reported live. However breaking news is not journalism. That is the skill of checking the facts, verifying and adding context and comment. Some commentators have said that news no longer breaks, it now tweets. Certainly the way major news breaks and is first shared may now have changed forever but true insightful, analytical comment on the stories will always come from proper journalism not retweets. I will however leave the last word though to Sohaib Athar who after his now famous tweet followed with: "and here come the mails from mainstream media....sigh".

Tim Youngman is Head of Digital Marketing for Archant follow him on Twitter @timyoungman

2D barcodes - more than just a funny blob

2011-04-07T04:19:00.000-07:00

Some of you may have noticed strange small squares made up of black and white shapes appearing on adverts and posters and even shop windows. This is not some new form of graffiti but in fact they are 2D barcodes. If you have not noticed them before you soon will do as worldwide usage of them has quadrupled over the last year and now even mainstream brands like Waitrose are using them, but more on that later.

A 2D barcode works in the same way as the barcode on the back of a tin of beans i.e. you scan it. However instead of having to drag a supermarket till around with you, these are created to be scanned by mobile phones and hence their use has exploded with the growth in smart phones.

The name “2D barcode” is a generic term used to describe these mobile tags and you may have heard of them being used by some of the branded versions such as QR Codes or EZ Code. But they are all the same thing. A user downloads a 2D barcode reader to their smart phone, of which there are many freely available, and then they can scan 2D barcodes wherever they see them. The barcode effectively acts as a graphic link to a website or webpage which the phone then displays which could contain anything the brand owner wants so long as it’s been optimised for mobile display.

Good examples of how brands have used them include the aforementioned Waitrose Christmas campaign featuring Saint Delia and Heston Blumenthal. Here 2D barcodes were added to the print ads of the campaign which linked users straight to the Waitrose mobile site and the recipes being featured in the ads. Eurosport added a 2D barcode to its print advertising for its coverage of the Australian Open which linked to its mobile live scoring service.

There are issues with this new technology currently though. It’s so new most early adopters have found that unless they are targeting tech savvy mobile users, they need to add some form of caption underneath the code explaining how to get a reader and the process of scanning the code. The link must also direct users to a mobile optimised web offering, another common mistake.

However this new technology gives brands so many different ways to use it. They can be used in print advertising as a novel way of driving people to your content. You can add them to business cards and marketing material to drive people to further information about your company or products. They could be added to vouchers or posters in your stores and my favourite idea is having them printed onto branded t-shirts.

Creating a 2D code is very easy and there are lots of free sites that do it for you, just Google “2D barcode generator”. These are here to stay and early adopters will get the best stand out and your usage is only limited by your imagination.

Tim Youngman is head of digital marketing for Archant – follow him on Twitter @timyoungman

Boom or Bust - Dotcom Valuations Soaring Again

2011-03-16T05:41:00.000-07:00

For my sins I have been working in and around the web since before the days of boo.com and Lastminute started. I once worked for an Internet Service Provider, long since swallowed up and re-branded, and got excited about valuations of the business based on the numbers of subscribers. I honestly thought that my share option at the time would allow me to retire before I was 30. Of course now I know I will be working until I am 70. It never occurred to many of us that the real value of the business is not how many people use it but how much profit it generates. A couple of years later and the dot com crash happened and valuations crashed, and investments from individuals who should have known better stopped.

A lot has changed since then but valuations of pure-play internet companies have started to rise again. You might think that the Google bid for Groupon, the daily deal website, of $6bn was an incredible figure. However Groupon made a reported $760m in revenue in 2010 which put that number into perspective. Rightmove the property site has recently been valued at £1bn helped by the fact that it made pre-tax profits of £52.2m last year from selling listing on its site to estate agents. Against those numbers you can see where the valuations come from.

However there are other examples which don’t make sense. The online music service Spotify has just managed to get $100m funding to try to compete with Apple’s iTunes service. That funding means that the business is valued at $1bn despite the fact that it is currently loss making. Compare that to HMV the high street and now also online music store, whose market capitalisation is currently $150m or about a seventh of the loss making online only Spotify.

Also last month AOL bought the American news website the Huffington Post for $315m. That is almost the same price as the current valuation for Trinity Mirror. That has 5 national newspapers, including the Daily Mirror, 160 regional newspapers and over 500 websites let alone 6,500 staff. Trinity is not helped by its borrowings of £260m and a pension fund deficit of £161m. By the way that means that Rightmove and its one site is worth 6 times Trinity Mirror according to the City.

As you can tell by the number of $ signs in the column most of these valuations are being driven by American companies. However there now definitely seems to be a trend of upwards valuations of internet companies. This time around however on the whole the lessons from the last bust have been learnt and they are mainly being valued on the cold hard reality of how much cash is being generated by the business. History teaches much and I hope that those who are now responsible for valuing who then were probably at high school look back at the last boom. That may keep the lesson to Boo who rather than Boo hoo.

Tim Youngman is head of digital marketing for Archant follow him on Twitter @timyoungman

Should brands provoke emotion and why desire is the strongest

2011-02-15T09:00:00.000-08:00

One of my lecturers at university, way way back, was one of the team responsible for the infamous Club 18-30’s marketing campaigns. He spent many hours drilling into his students that true brands must evoke some form of emotion in people. If there is no emotion it is just a product, emotions makes people choose a brand even if other products may fulfil a users needs better.

When questioned on his philosophy regarding to a brand evoking a hate reaction his response was that there is a fine line between love and hate. It is the challenge of the marketing professional to understand that fine line and to move users from one side of the coin to the other. Doing it in the real world is a different thing but he was of course right.

He did miss one emotion that arguably is stronger than both love and hate. You may love Heinz and you might hate marmite but if you desire something you often are prepared to pay a premium to have your desire satisfied.

A new study from band consultancy Clear compiled a league table of desirable brands after asking 4,000 consumers their views on a list of 300 brands. Some brands in the list such as Oxo at 47 would be a surprise but the top three of iPhone, Rolls Royce and iPod are probably not. Interestingly only eight of the top twenty are what would be described as luxury goods and three quarters of the top 100 are not either, including such “desirable” brands as Dettol and Domestos.

Surveys are of course just a view of a subset of public opinion and clearly not everyone can manage or create a sense of desire into their brands. However from the obvious in the top twenty including Aston Martin, Prada and Rolex the inclusion of Cadbury at number four might surprise you.

Cadbury has managed to both appeal to hearts and minds and have a clear understanding of how its brands fit into peoples lives. For example, the recent Gorilla playing the drums TV ad for Dairy Milk did actually have a point. It was not the result of a long afternoon in the pub coming up with creatives. It was created to remind people of the enjoyment of eating chocolate visually shown by the enjoyment of the gorilla beating the drums. I didn’t get that either by the way. They do though spend time trying to understand how people lead their lives and then how their product could fit into this. For example whether people prefer eating bars of chocolate or from more convenient bags.

Not every brand will be desirable, nor would it be right for many brands to try to achieve this emotional reaction as it might not actually be right for the product or service. For those that have potential though the rewards of achieving this desirable state are clear.

Tim Youngman is head of digital marketing for Archant follow him on Twitter @timyoungman

Happy New Year - Advertising Predictions for 2011

2011-01-18T06:28:00.000-08:00

This New Year, branded “the year of austerity”, will no doubt be hard for many but will also come with highlights for others. You might think that the world of advertising will be hit from reducing budgets and a general belt tightening. However many major brand owners have spoken on record that they will be spending similar amounts, and more in most cases, to last year but spread over a greater number of channels and initiatives. Three areas to look out for in 2011 will be local coupons, product placement on television and location based advertising on mobiles.

Local coupons and vouchers have become massive in the US over the last year with Google even trying to buy the US company Groupon for $6bn. These will become a new vehicle for local companies to create new business and innovative local companies like tickles.co.uk are already offering daily deals to thousands of registered users across Norfolk and Suffolk.

Product placement on television, which I have lost count of the number of times I have written about, finally starts in the UK at the end of next month. Placement is nothing new in the states and with our channels filled with US imports, viewers are already well used to the sight of bottles of Coca Cola and Pepsi looming large. By the end of this year you can expect this to change. While you may not see pints of Fosters across the bar at the Rovers Return, you will start to see placements of other kinds in programs on commercial channels as they try to claw back recently lost revenues.

By this summer mobile operator Orange has announced it is launching location based ads with O2 expecting a roll out by the third quarter of 2011. What this means is that if your phone works on those networks you can opt in to receive ads sent to you based on where you are. So you could be walking down your local high street past a Starbucks and you would be sent an offer such as 50p off a cup of coffee to tempt you into the store to purchase. This may sound intrusive but the key point is that these will be opt in ads i.e. you have to sign up to the service to get them.

Despite all these new and wonderful ways of being inundated with adverts there is no guarantee that the adverts themselves will be any good. So I would like to leave you this month with the results of a recent poll in Marketing Magazine of the most irritating ads of last year. In top position was that affront to music the Gocompare series of ads with that opera singer. The number two slot was taken by the frankly terrible webuyanycar and number 3 was injurylayers4u . All definitely irritating ads, but through people remembering them they have all done their job. If you have any other candidates send them to me via twitter @timyoungman. Happy New Year readers!

Tim Youngman is head of digital marketing for Archant – follow him on Twitter @timyoungman

To review or not to review that is the question

2010-12-06T05:00:00.000-08:00

There are many ways to tell when an issue or topic has gone mainstream. You could look at press clippings or even Google it and see the number pages. If it’s very current you could even just see how many people are discussing it on Twitter. However I have created a new monitoring tool which I like to call “the one show test”. The One Show, long lost child of Nationwide and the Blue Peter for adults is now famed for the varying topics it covers. So when something is picked up by them you know it has reached a critical mass. So it was with the debate about the pros and cons of customer review sites.

The piece in question was regarding the rights and wrongs of the tourism review site Tripadvisor. Over 40m people a month log on the site to read what others have said about hotels and activities to do when on holiday. The coverage on the One Show stemmed from the class action that Tripadvisor is facing in the US from some US hoteliers who claim that negative reviews are defamatory. As the reviews can be anonymous, the hoteliers say there is no way of verifying that the reviews are genuine and from people who have really experienced their hotel or service. I was recently a judge for the recent EDP Tourism Awards in the online category and at the awards night last Friday I asked some of those present their views both on TripAdvisor and reviews in general. Most were positive but also voiced the ease of potential abuse.

As the web becomes more social focussed and less a big data warehouse,e so this move to reviews will continue. Ten years ago most of what was said about a business was probably put there by the business themselves, now, most has come from others. Research firm Forrester recently published a European survey that showed that 54% of respondents stated that what others say about a brand directly affects their shopping basket.

Argos took the brave step of allowing open reviews against all its product lines online a few years ago. This is a business that last year posted sales from its website of £1.4billion and that is set for another step change this year. Not all the reviews are positive but overall they view their openness as only a positive for the perception of Argos and helps enforce buying decisions on positive products and stock decisions on poor reviewed one.

Locally, Naked Wines, the Norfolk based online wine retailer, also uses reviews as a key part of its offerings. My last purchase from them was driven from an email offering a discount on wines in return for reviews, and reviews and customer ratings are an integral part of the Naked Wines online offering.

As I have said in previous columns this trend will only continue so the choice is to exploit it to your benefit or ignore and potentially miss out to others who don’t.

Tim Youngman is head of digital marketing for Archant – follow him on Twitter @timyoungman

Gap and its logo 360 turnaround

2010-10-26T08:21:00.000-07:00

This month saw one of the more embarrassing about turns in the last year and I am not talking about RooneyGate. No this comes from that well know purveyor of clothing Gap. Gap actually started in 1969 in San Francisco and since then has grown to its current position of owning 5 leading store brands including Banana Republic and Old Navy and now turns over $14bn a year.

Gap, as you may or may not know, is also quite famous for using its own name and logo splashed over its clothing. Of course many clothing brands do that but Gap has always been known to do it in a very American way and sometime in your life you have probably seen someone wearing a sweatshirt with GAP in large letters on the front.

Its name and indeed its logo, with Gap in white text sitting in a blue box, is one of the more recognisable logos in the world. So much so that I was surprised to see that it was considering changing it. I was even more amused during the following 7 days of extreme embarrassment for the Gap board.

On October 6th Gap announced it was changing its logo, removing the blue box and changing the font. Within hours the new logo was universally panned with some descriptions not right for this family newspaper. The kinder ones related it to something created in 5mins in Powerpoint or that it was more geared towards a new piece of accounting software, ouch!

Social media sites were flooded with comments, virtually all negative. Within 3 days Gap’s senior management announced that the new logo was being retracted and that they had decided to start a “crowdsurfing project” to come up with better ideas. Now I had never heard of that one either and presumed that they came up with it while in a more lenient coffee house considering the current debate in California to legalise marijuana.

Most commentators renamed its “crowdsufing project” to what it actually was, an embarrassing u-turn. However that’s not where it ended, on October 12th just 6 days after it started and 3 after the announcement of its first change of policy, the president of Gap North America announced that it was withdrawing its “crowdsurfing” strategy and returning to its original logo.

This spectacular 360 degree turn of policy quite rightly attracted large amounts of media attention. Interestingly many commentators concluded that this was all an extremely clever piece of press manipulation designed to create large brand awareness. They simply could not believe that a company as large as Gap could make such an almighty hash of such a big thing. I could almost buy that argument if they had just stopped at the “crowdsourcing” point and ended up shortlisting some of the thousands of received logo suggestions for a worldwide integrated campaign using a social media driven vote on a new logo. But they didn’t, they turned face again and went back to the old saying they had “learned a lot in this process”.

In my opinion this was a simple case of a very public mistake that they took too long to correct. Logos are an emotive subject and often overplayed. Take Tesco, its logo has been subtly tweaked over time, but it’s pretty much the same as it has been since I had hair and it hasn’t stopped it taking over the world. Changing your logo will not turn your business round. Understanding your customer needs and delivering products solutions to them will. I hope in Gap’s case the management has learnt its lesson.

Tim Youngman is head of digital marketing for Archant – follow him on Twitter @timyoungman

Tablet Wars - iPad vs the Playbook

2010-10-01T03:05:00.000-07:00

The problem with brand new shiny toys is that after a short while they are not so new and not so shiny. This is pre-built into all of us when as children we realise that our new toys from birthday or Christmas within a couple of weeks are not so new and not so shiny due to excessive use. After that something else invariably catches the eye and becomes the next object of desire.

Some have argued that this is what keeps the world economy turning and they may be right but its especially true with technology. A couple of years ago you could sit in a coffee house playing with an iPhone and feel the envious stares at you. Today there are no stares as everyone is playing with their own smartphone from various makes and the iPhone seems, dare I say it, a bit old.

Luckily I have had the pleasure of feeling the stares again for the last few months as I have sat working on my iPad. I have even happily given people demonstrations of the shiny toy as I do truly love it. However, as with all new shiny toys, when one stands out other toy makers up their game to get a piece of the action.

First against the iPad were the Galaxy Tablet from Samsung and the amusingly named Streak from Dell, although its 5 inch screen puts it on the small side. Last week however a more serious contender was announced; the Playbook from Blackberry.

Blackberry is a major player in the smartphone market. In the US in July, according to figures from research firm Comscore, they lead the marketplace with a 39.3% market share followed by iPhone at 23.8% and Google Andriod phones at 17%. Blackberry has also traditionally been the business smartphone of choice and its this market, rather than the consumer market, they have targeted this new tablet computer at.

The new Playbook comes with a 7inch screen and front and rear cameras allowing video conferencing and has been geared for the high security network systems that businesses like. Unlike some of its competitors it has no 3G capabilities but does have wifi and Bluetooth. Although they have not announced a price it is expected to be high especially as they described it as “professional grade” which means “we are going to charge a lot for this”.

Some analysts are predicting that sales of the iPad will reach 12m by the end of this year. Hewlett Packard CEO Todd Bradley said last week in a speech announcing its own tablet effort, that they believe that the tablet market will be worth $40bn a year in a next few years. So its pretty obvious why manufacturers are looking at how they can get a slice of the pie. Blackberry is hoping that its business relationships will help them gain a big slice of that pie. Calling a proposed serious business machine the Playbook rather than the rumoured Blackpad or Blackbook I would argue however was one big mistake.

Still whatever happens, the coffee houses of the UK will soon be filled with people surfing the web and checking emails on screens large enough to actually read what they are looking at. It is even rumoured that Aldi are going to launch a branded version. You could argue these are just toys but if you are a website owner you should be quietly pleased that more people can access your site wherever and whenever they want. More importantly on a screen they can actually see what you are offering.

Tim Youngman is head of digital marketing for Archant

Social Media and the art of public speaking

2010-09-03T08:08:00.000-07:00

It’s a long time since I have delivered a presentation to local businesses here in Norfolk but I recently was asked if I would present at its upcoming Digital Simple conference on September 16th (www.digitalsimple.co.uk). The invite left me thinking long and hard on what would interest 150 people enough to listen to me for a half an hour.

The last time I gave some presentations with the chamber was over 8 years ago. Then I asked the audience how many people had booked a flight online or did their banking online. Only a few raised their hands. Today these seem daft questions as the internet is now such a common part of most people’s lives. In the last 8 years the internet itself has not changed that much. What has changed however is how many people use it, how often they use it and through what devices and what they are using it for.

It was only a few months ago that I wrote a column about privacy issues with Facebook. Yes I did gloat when I read Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google earlier last month talk in an interview about the dangers of releasing too much personal information on social media sites. However when there are 500m worldwide Facebook users and 26m in this country that is a difficult message to get across. There is a danger in sharing personal info but there is just as much being shared online about brands and businesses, as there is drunk photos that may come back to haunt. Eight years ago the internet was a tool to find information. It is still that but today just as much time is spent sharing experiences as finding info.

People are not just finding out where a restaurant is and what time it opens but sharing reviews of the food with their friends and complete strangers. If you are a business, the change in the way people use the internet is important. You need to understand that people are now online talking about you, not just finding info about you. You can either choose to ignore that or participate in the conversation.

It’s by no coincidence that the largest single driver of mobile internet access is social media as people want to share views and information from wherever they are. With the huge growth in internet enabled mobile phones it is now commonplace to see people sharing their thoughts right from where they are, from the restaurant to the shop floor. Customers now have the tools and technology to share views both positive and negative right at the point they have them and if they are negative this instance access means no time for cooling off or reflection.

However this change in internet behaviour driven by the growth in social media should be seen as a blessing not a curse, an opportunity not a threat. The different social media tools allow businesses to create real engagement with existing and potential customers. It probably will not immediately increase your bottom line and will take up time. That investment in time though will bring you a deeper relationship with some customers and introduce others to you and your area of expertise where you can then direct them to your website where the real selling should happen.

The way people use the web and how often they do has fundamentally changed over the last 8 years and there is no going back. So I decided to name my talk “the changing face of the internet and the new rules of engagement”. Not the catchiest of titles but if you are free on the 16th come and see me at the Open Bank Plain Norwich at 2:20pm. There may even be a quiz!

Tim Youngman is Head of Digital Marketing for Archant

ITV 2010 First Half Profits and Move to Online

2010-08-04T04:59:00.000-07:00

August is usually a quiet time in Britain’s favourite pastime, TV land, before the adventures start all over again. No sooner as we realise that the nights are drawing in, so we will see the long run in to Christmas start with the return of the X Factor. This normally brings cheer for ITV bosses looking forward to better ad revenues but they have had better fortunes this year.

2009 was a bad year for ITV. Advertising revenues slumped massively and I suspect that Adam Crozier, previously of Football Association and Post Office fame, probably wondered why he took the job. Luckily for him however, by the end of 2009 ad buyers started to remember the reach of primetime television advertising, allowing 30 slots in the final of X Factor last year to be sold for upwards of £250,000 a go.

This year it’s a very different story and ITV have just announced pre-tax half year profits of £118m which you can compare with a loss of £4 in the same period last year. This is an impressive turnaround in any business especially one that is supposedly under massive competition, not just from the expansion of available television channels, but also from ad spend moving to other media especially the internet.

ITV has made some big changes in a small amount of time and are now concentrating on growing audience share, selling more of its shows to the international marketing and exploiting its programme content across multiple channels.

It is the last of those that has created the most media hype as its first move is a deal with Sky to put its high definition channels on Sky’s paid for platform. It looks as if ITV1 HD will continue to be available through Freeview but if you want the HD versions of ITV2, 3 or 4 you will need a Sky subscription. This is designed to help ITV become less reliant on your traditional TV ad revenue and moves it into the subscription TV market, albeit using a massive partner in the form of Sky.

During the first half of this year video views on the ITV Player, its equivalent of the BBC iPlayer, fell 14% but it did have 4% more people watching. This will also be a key area for them as unlike the BBC they can put ads all over web TV viewing. Crozier has put on record this is an area for growth and that they are “subscale given the size of the online video market”. He has backed this with a £75m investment over three years in online. So look out for more promotion of ITV Player and the probable introduction of pay per view micropayments.

So all very nice for ITV but what does this mean for the viewer? Well hopefully it should be good news. If ITV looking to boost its online presence and international presence can only do that by generating good content and by that I mean quality programming. I hope that ITV’s new management team will recognise that to grow it has to make more shows that people want to watch. A turnaround in fortune gives it a real chance to create the programming that it built a worldwide reputation for and be grow it profits at the same time.

Tim Youngman is head of digital marketing for Archant

Digital Tourists

2010-07-07T08:00:00.000-07:00

We may have limped out of the World Cup, but like most of the £100k a week so called players, many of us will now be looking forward to our holidays. We are lucky in this part of the UK to be so close to some fantastic places to stay, visit and enjoy. Tourism is vital to the East Anglian economy, for example in Great Yarmouth the local council estimates the value to its economy to be £480m and it sustains 30% of the local workforce.

So while the sun lasts I thought it would be interesting to see how some local tourist attractions and businesses are using new digital marketing techniques to grow their own businesses.

A good example of this is Centre Parcs, which has its Elevedon Forest Village destination at Thetford, and now uses the internet as a fundamental tool to grow its visitor numbers. Centre Parcs uses a range of digital marketing techniques to attract both new and returning visitors. As well as Google PPC and an ongoing programme of search optimisation, Centre Parcs now use innovative digital display advertising to drive people to its website. Interestingly these ads are not just placed on the major portals but also on more targeted sites such as Mumsnet.

They also have an extensive email CRM program which starts from 16 weeks before your visit to welcome you and encourage you to book activities. This forms part of an ongoing communication both before the holiday, giving information about your stay, and after the holiday, with newsletters and offers encouraging you to come back again. According to Jo Button, Centre Parcs e-commerce marketing manager, 4 years ago 30% of all bookings were done via its website, this has now grown to around 70% showing the effectiveness of what they have been doing.

Another local holiday village company, Richardon’s, have also seen the benefit of increasing its online activity. They worked with Norwich based search marketing agency Further who re-designed its site and concentrated on improving its search rankings. This has seen 75% of all visitors now come from search engines and a strong growth in bookings.

An example of an attraction using digital marketing effectively comes in the form of the BeWILDerwood adventure park which links with tourism websites including Visit Norwich, Visit Norfolk and Visit East of England as well as national family and days out sites. Jo Artherton from BeWILDerwood said “We consider online activity a really important part of our marketing strategy and referrals from these sites alone account for a substantial 21% of the traffic coming to our website”.

It is clear that our local tourist industry is becoming more digitally focussed and indeed now more reliant on digital marketing techniques as tools to grow business and visitors. So much so that this years EDP Norfolk Tourism Awards will for the first time include a new category “Most effective use of online marketing”.

It is great to see an industry so important to the East Anglian economy embrace and indeed benefit from a well thought out and well implemented game plan. Shame our footballers could not have learnt some lessons from them.

Tim Youngman is head of digital marketing for Archant

Facebook Privacy

2010-06-04T03:32:00.001-07:00

I have been writing columns in newspapers for over 10 years and in that time two things have not changed. Firstly my hair has not grown back and secondly people are still surprised when scandals appear. In the last month we have seen both Lord Triesman and Sarah Ferguson caught saying things they really shouldn’t, in Fergies case blaming it on a “lapse of judgement”. My lapses of judgement normally involve a hangover the next day, not asking for half a million pounds but there you go. Both cases got me thinking about privacy, how we view it, and in most cases don’t.

Ten years ago I was writing about how you should be careful about what you put in an email as they can easily be sent round not just the office, but in a few famous cases, the world. That now seems obvious and since then technology has moved on and so has our use of it. First came mobile phones and illicit text messages and then social media. Suddenly various elements of the media found it easy to get their hands on dubious pictures of celebrities as they have been dumb enough to put them on their profile pages. Now we have MP’s being warned about what they write in their Twitter accounts especially when written from the bath. I would hope that was not just a lecture about letting people know that but also the dangers of mixing electricity and water.

Social media now is not just a fad it is mainstream. Facebook has over half a billion registered users world wide. The largest played game in the world is not Call of Duty but the Facebook farm game which says a lot for the human race. In March in the UK Facebook generated over 30% of all the ad impressions delivered that’s 20.9 billion ad impressions.

So that’s a lot of people sharing everything from what they are doing, to photos of themselves doing it, to even reviews of what they like. You don’t of course just share that with your friends but also people like me if you have not changed your privacy settings. Facebook recently launched Facebook connect. If a Facebook user clicks on a Facebook connect button on a site to say they like it, the brand owner then can access that person’s info. I was at a conference two weeks ago where I was shown how in two clicks to tell me from those who had clicked how I could find out how many single female cat owners liked my brand, where they lived and how to contact them. That is unless they change their privacy settings. As Facebooks privacy settings are currently longer than the US constitution you can see why people have not bothered but that is about to change.

Facebook is under pressure to simplify its settings as users want to have more privacy. A telling fact is that a group of 4 students in America tried to raise $10k to build a more privacy centric social media site and raised $200k in a week to do so. As a final point I asked some of the younger members of my team about how they view their online privacy and the response was “that’s just the way it is”. It looks like I will be writing the same column in another 10 years time.

Tim Youngman is head of digital marketing for Archant

world cup fever

2010-06-04T03:31:00.000-07:00

You would think that despite the freezing May weather we could all look forward to a quiet summer punctuated by wet barbeques and Wimbledon disappointed. However you would be wrong.

No, a very busy summer is just round the corner, or June 11th to be precise and the clues are there already. Just like the first sight of a Cadburys Creme Egg means that Christmas is over, the first England flag, hat, clapper, baby grow, any piece of tat that can take branding, means that the World Cup is on its way.
So just when you thought you could sit back and watch your normal shows without volcano updates or party political broadcasts changing the schedule, a summer of football will once again change all that. I for one cannot wait.

This year, according to one projection from Nielsen, over half the globe will be watching the events from South Africa. That massive audience means a very busy summer for any business that can spin a link to the World Cup. The British Retail Consortium estimated that the last World Cup benefitted UK retailers to the tune of £1bn and 4 years on with the recession fresh in the mind that uplift is sorely needed.

The ads are starting to appear on our televisions ranging vastly in quality with my personal favourite definitely being the Sony TV trade in ad. Many brands have been planning for this for a long time to maximise the World Cup effect. Walkers have created 15 new flavours for people to vote on and don’t think they just rushed this through, this is years of planning coming to fruition.
The World Cup has 6 official sponsors including two you’ll probably have not heard of Budweiser, Castrol, Continental Tyres, McDonald’s, MTN Wireless and Satyam. They have spent many many millions just on the sponsorship and that is without any additional spend on advertising and creation of support materials. They are matched by six other official FIFA sponsors, but they are just twelve in a world wide rush to cash in on a world watching 32 teams play football.

The World Cup is now a massive business creating billions of additional spend around the world. Google “world cup ad spend” and you can read stories from across the globe ranging from the effect on lager sales in Holland to a predicted 20% increase in ad spend in Guatemala.

I for one will be glued to the TV watching every game possible. However if you are not a fan unfortunately you will not be able to escape this years World Cup, it will be everywhere in the next couple of weeks. So please sit back and think of the positive effect on the economy, it will soon be Christmas.
Tim Youngman is head of digital marketing for Archant

General Election Digital Fever

2010-04-14T01:50:00.001-07:00

We all knew it was coming, but it has finally arrived, the biggest thing in media this month is the impending general election. When Mr Brown stood outside Number 10 announcing May 6th, media plans that have been in place for over a year were put into motion. So now we are off in the roller coaster of coverage that that will dominate all the media channels for the next month.

Over the next few weeks we will see many firsts in British politics. Probably the biggest of these in terms of audience will be the televised debates on Sky, BBC and ITV between the potential leaders. However if the successful Obama campaign in the US is to be believed, it will be the digital activity by the parties that will have potentially the biggest impact.

Since the last election our ability to access information and share with people, both friends and strangers, has changed dramatically. Direct mail from the parties used to be just leaflets and, at the last couple of elections, some emails, and this will of course continue. My recycling bin heaved at the last by-election for Norwich North with seemingly half of Thetford Forest being used to bombard me with leaflets from all parties on a daily basis. I suspect many in marginal constituencies around the country will suffer a similar fate over the next month.

This general election however will see all the parties using every digital channel they can from personal blogs and websites to Youtube videos, from Facebook campaigns to Twitter updates. We the hapless media of course are lapping this all up, Anglia TV has even given one of its reporters the lovely task of following all the local candidates digital output.

All these new digital tools can be seen as creating a new way for candidates to communicate with potential voters. Likewise they can also be a great way for potential voters to get greater access to candidates and parties to find out why they should vote for them. However there is always the danger of trying to be too cool for school and failing. David Cameron famously said “Politicians do have to think about what we say and the problem with Twitter, the instantness of it, I think that too many tweets might make a t***”. Unfortunately for the now ex Labour candidate for Moray Stuart MacLennan he clearly was not paying any attention to that. Although despite the Conservative leaders quite rightly apprehension regarding potential problems with Twitter, it is still widely used by his candidates, including a feed from Millbank HQ itself, although one would suspect a more closely monitored one than before.

Whatever the outcome on May 6th, this general election will be the closest, probably the most exciting and certainly the most covered and analysed, whether in column inches, airtime minutes or web pages. Compared with 20 years ago this election will give the voting public many more ways to find out what they need to choose which way to vote, a great many of these coming through new, digital routes. If this encourages more people to vote in an informed way that can only be a good thing.

Tim Youngman is head of digital marketing for Archant

BBC Cutbacks and the demise of 6Music et al

2010-03-19T02:16:00.000-07:00

There have been many televisual highlights in the month since my last column but none as sweet as the sight of Mark Thompson, BBC Director General, being grilled by Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight. I might have been wrong but within the usual laconic look that Paxman adorns while tearing strips from his interviewees I felt there was a definite backdrop of enjoyment to this interview. Mark Thompson was there to be interviewed regarding the results of the recent BBC strategic review which concluded that severe costs need to be stripped from its operations.

The proposed cull is wide and varied and across all the Beeb’s current media output. It includes the potential closure of the digital radio stations 6 Music and Asian Network. Some of the teenage output will be closed as well as spend on buying in overseas shows such as Heroes. The big hit is to its online division where web output could be halved, backed by a 25% cut in staff numbers. The web operation's £112m budget, yes you did read that right, will also be cut by 25%. It was not all cuts though with additional investment earmarked for BBC2.

Importantly for the Regional press, Thomson also announced that its local websites will be refocused to carry only news, sport, weather, travel and "local knowledge content". He also stated a commitment to never to increase the BBC's number of local services on television, radio and online or to make any existing services more local.

For many years now dear old Aunty has walked a fine line between King Canute and Emperor Augustus. On one hand it has tried to hold back the tide of media expansion from other channels against its position. On the other, expanding hell for leather in all ways especially digital, both radio and web. When your annual spend budget is over £3bn, i.e. the amount of money they get from our license fees, they have been able to do that quite happily. Now in these recession times with a general election in a couple of months and a need to reposition for the “how can you justify the license fee” debate, they have to be seen to be doing something.

By announcing the results of this review, like Hadrian with his wall, the beeb has effectively stated that the expansion era is over and it will now work within defined boundaries. However in doing this it has created a backlash and debate about what the role and output should be of a public service broadcaster. This has not just come from the usual media columns but from the public as well. The most interesting reading has been the comments left on websites against stories linked to the cuts. Time and time again the question comes up as to what is the license fee for. This review on cost and focus was a starting point to answering that question but the wrath it has unleashed would indicate they have a lot more explaining to do.

The iPad - a masterclass in PR

2010-02-18T04:47:00.000-08:00

There’s hype, there’s big hype and then there was the launch of the iPad. The new piece of must have technology from Apple was launched with massive worldwide media coverage. Every newspaper covered its launch; it had worldwide prime time news coverage. The internet went into meltdown not only on news sites but the blogosphere and social sites also went mad.

I could spend this column talking about what it does and bemoaning the fact that something that is primarily designed to access the web does not support Flash. That’s actually because Apple and Adobe are currently in the middle of a handbags at dawn fight. However if you sit back and look at all this coverage you have to reflect that its quite a lot for something that can double as a touch sensitive tea tray.

Apple got all this coverage for a number of reasons, the biggest being that its last few launches have radically changed the markets they targeted. Think what the iPod has done for the music industry and the iPhone to the mobile market. Apple also benefits from a customer base who loves their products. Talk to an Apple user and most will eulogise about the product they have, they are real brand advocates. This passion comes from a focus on the design and ease of use of the product, Apple truly focuses on how people will use its products. It also designs them so they are items of desire not just bits of kit and then markets them as such. Would we all want an iPod or an iPhone if they did not look, well simply cool? No, of course not. There was real hype surrounding this launch because of what the rumours of what this new toy will be and will it have the same effect on using the internet as Apple has had on phones and listening to music.

There were of course other things happening in the world on Jan 27th. Other businesses were trying to survive these troubled times and you have to feel sorry for those who were trying to launch new products on the same day and desperately trying to get some media attention. For example on the same day as the iPad launched, Ultimo launched a new underwear collection fronted by Peaches Geldof. Costa Coffee unfortunately launched its new beverage the flat white (something very familiar to anyone who has travelled around America or Australia) with Peter Andre holding a cup of the stuff. You can insert your own gag on both launches here.

Whether the iPad will live up to the hype remains to be seen but it took three incarnations of the iPhone before everybody got it and wanted one or something like it. I suspect that the iPad will have the same effect in a few years when it seems natural that we sit watching TV surfing the web using something that can double as an expensive chopping board. So do I want one? Of course, but purely for testing our new mobile sites on it, not because it’s cool or anything! So while I wait for the UK launch I will keep listening to music on my iPod while taking calls on the iPhone, perhaps I’ll also have a flat white while I wait.

New Year Predictions

2010-01-21T03:54:00.000-08:00

So here we are dear readers, a new decade starts but this time without all the bangs and whistles of the start of the last 10 years. For my first column of the new decade I thought I would provide you with my own musings on things that may or may not happen in the media 2010.

Let’s start with television and unfortunately this will not be the year that reality television dies. This is the year that will see the mother of reality shows finish in the UK as the last Big Brother will screen over the summer months. BB started out as a genuine genius of a programme idea. An experiment to see how strangers would cope living together for a long time in a confined environment. It is now just a way to get on the front cover of Nuts so will not be missed. However this year the celebrity talent show will continue unabridged.

The big question will be who replaces Jonathan Ross once he leaves the BBC in July. My predictions are for Mark Kermode for Film 2010 and watch this space to see if Chris Evans returns to TV for the chat show. Simon Cowell will continue his dominance having now agreed the deal to take X Factor to the US as both presenter and producer, thus moving him closer to becoming a modern day King Midas. The real story of this year however will be 3D television. Just as you thought you had got your heads around HD TV along comes 3D TV and having seen a set, trust me you will want one.

On the airwaves radio will continue to be dominated by the BBC. It will be interesting to see if whether Radio 1 actually gives Chris Moyles his cards as it is reminded of its remit as a youth music radio station not a speech station. On Radio 2 Chris Evans has allegedly been told he can loose up to a million Wogan diehards but what his audience will be will be the source of many columns in the Daily Mail.

So finally to newspapers. Last year was an annus horribilus for all sectors of the press both national and regional. However throughout last year there were some highs as well as the lows. Yes London lost its two main free evenings but now the Evening Standard is both free and still currently exactly the same quality as the old paid for no one is complaining. We also now have Russian oligarchs owning papers in the way they do Premiership football clubs. So don’t be surprised if Alexander Lebedev extends the Standard empire and buys the Independent.

I am sure that 2010 will bring many twists and turns for the world of media and as consumers you will have more choice and more say on what you choose to consume with the little spare time you have. Oh and lets not forget we have a general election to look forward to as well so I know how much you are all looking forward to all that political advertising. Happy New Year readers.

X Factor, ITV and Simon Cowell

2009-12-18T06:43:00.000-08:00

So the winner of the X Factor, Joe McElderry, is now filling the tabloids with headlines and suprisingly fighting this year for the Christmas no 1. However he is not the real winner of the X Factor, no he should not fool himself. On current X Factor run rate he will have as much chance of playing in butlins holiday camps in two years time as he does playing Las Vegas. There are two real winners from this yeas X Factor the first being ITV themselves.

ITV has had a terrible time of it over the last few years. It has seen revenues decline and decline and it took over 7 months to find a new chairman with many drop outs despite an astronomical salary on offer. However its new Chairman, ex Asda boss Archie Norman, must be now looking forward to his Christmas turkey thanks to the success of this year’s X Factor. The reason behind all of this, as with everything, is money and in this case advertising revenue.

The final of the X Factor in the UK this year was expected to generate £20 million of ad revenues for ITV, yes £20 million just for the final. Spot rates for the final were an alleged £250,000. Overall the X Factor is expected to have generated over £100 million for ITV this year.

However whichever way you look at it the overall winner always has been and always will be the man on the end with the waxed chest. Yes the big winner is always Simon Cowell. Cowell’s appearance fee’s alone for the series are estimated around the £5m mark. He is also the major owner of the format and gets paid for that and through his production company Syco he is also paid for production fees. This adds another estimated £2million. So his personal take home from this year’s X Factor is estimated at £7million. However this is small potatoes compared to his US deal where he is lead judge on American Idol. This is a reputed $125 million (£75m) for the next two series.

This of course is just part of the his total incomes, add in Britain’s Got Talent and the little matter of all the revenue from the acts now signed to his record label and I start to get lost at the potential income. All I do know is that the other day the entire top 10 were either acts that were signed to Cowell or had appeared on X Factor within the last few weeks. With that sort of power it looks like X Factor will be here for a long while yet. So have a good Christmas dear readers, Mr Cowell definitely will.

Who owns the brand?

2009-11-27T03:50:00.000-08:00

This week i was asked by one of Archant's divisions to give a presentation to the some of the marketing team of a major printer manufaturer. They were looking at how they could use digital marketing methods to increase customer contact and response. During the debate a theme that has become very prominant across many industries came to light, that being giving your consumers a voice in your business.

In recent months we have seen both British Gas and Eon create customer panels to help them seem more open and to put custmers needs at the heart of the business. Asda in October extended its customer panel and gave members direct influence on buying decisions which is a brave move.

Letting customers tell you more about what they think about your business is never easy from an internal point of view as you might hear things you and your board may not want to. However, as i pointed out the the print company, if a person has stuck their neck out and gained approval for spend, often in the hundred of thousands mark, they are already a beliver, These people have already put their respective necks on the line with your products and so could become valuable brand evangelists in their own right and should be seen as an asset not a liability.

So from consumer panels to simple messgae boards bringing your consumers more into your own business can bring far greater rewards than the oft percieved risks.

The PR Stunt

2009-11-13T08:53:00.001-08:00

November is traditionally the time of the year when many of that poor breed we call marketers have to start thinking about next years budgets. In these troubled times, even those fortunate enough to have 7 and even 8 figure marketing budgets are being forced to think of new, innovative and lets face it, cheaper ways to make their brands stand out.

As I have said many times before and in many different forums, this is no bad thing. It is very easy for marketers to rely on the same plans year after year and not really think about what they could do that is new and would create a real buzz and noise in their target marketplaces for their brands. One proven way of doing this is the PR stunt but the problem with such stunts is that they can go spectacularly right and just as easily go spectacularly wrong.

Let’s take one that went right. This year saw the best ever example of the PR stunt from our cousins down under. Tourism Queensland created the “best job in the world”. This was in effect a global tourism campaign disguised as a recruitment drive. The buzz that followed this piece of genius meant that hundreds of media organisations from around the world covered the story generating more than £40m worth of worldwide media coverage. In the end 34,000 people applied and one lucky chap from Hampshire got the job.

Now lets remember one that went wrong, or right depending how mean you are feeling. Richard Branson has spent a lifetime practising the art of the PR stunt and most have been very successful. Admittedly him waterskiing or standing on plane wings have become a little tired in recent years. So I was mildly amused when his attempts in 2007 to promote Virgin America by bungee jumping cum abseiling down a Las Vegas Casino from the roof. Unfortunately for Branson half way down he slammed into the side of the building, ripped his trousers and was gently let down the rest of the way where he quickly removed himself to the hotel without speaking to the press. Of course all of this was in the full glare of press and TV and created lots of the intended coverage but arguably of the wrong kind.

So if you get it right you can get massive amounts of positive brand coverage for little outlay. However if you get it wrong it can go very wrong. This problem has been exacerbated by the rise of social media online with thousands of passionate people happy to tear your brand reputation to shreds via Twitter, Blogs, Facebook et al.

There are few rules for PR stunts but If you are thinking try to think whether what you are planning will entertain and make people talk both online and offline. Most importantly be honest and make sure the brand is remembered as much as the stunt. Oh and try not loose your trousers in the process.

The Guardian, Trafigura and the right to publish

2009-10-22T08:03:00.000-07:00

Last week a colleague sent me a link to a story on the media guardian site the likes of which I have never in over 14 years of working in the media. The key extract of which can be read below:

“Today's published Commons order papers contain a question to be answered by a minister later this week. The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found.” “Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret.”

As you can imagine having read that I like thousands of other were intrigued as to what it was all about.

It turns out that British oil trader Trafigura had been hit by a lawsuit by 30,000 Africans claiming that they have been affected by the alleged dumping of toxic waste on the Ivory Coast. Trafigura reacted by hiring libel layers Carter Ruck who slapped injunctions on every media outfit to stop them reporting this.

An MP, Paul Farrelly, then tabled a question in Parliament about this injunction and Carter Rock responded to all threatening with action if anyone covered this question. This goes against hundreds of years of press freedom to report what MP’s say.

Luckily the editor of The Guardian Alan Rusbridger is not only a very clever journalist he also has an excellent understanding of social media. Having signed off the baffling story on the guardian website on the Monday night he personally tweeted on twitter the following: "Now Guardian prevented from reporting parliament for unreportable reasons. Did John Wilkes live in vain?"

Within hours twitter and the blogsphere had gone mental. By the Tuesday morning and a front page lead, the web was in melt down and by lunchtime Carter Ruck and Trafigura had caved in.

Unfortunately for Carter Ruck the internet is a whole new world. Following Rusbringers tweet, a follower of his Richard Wilson put two and two together and searched the parliament website where details of all questions are held. He then saw what it was, did some further web searches and tweeted the whole lot. This was then picked up, passed on and on and the rest is social history.

It was the speed of this that was astonishing. Wilson had made his comments by 9 o’clock and by 10 the well known political blogger Guido Fawkes had blogged on it. By 10am on Tuesday morning even Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg tweeted the following: "Very interested concerned about this #trafigura / Guardian story the LibDems are planning to take action on this."

This is the best example yet of the growing gap between those that understand old and new media and communication. Today the modern consumer is completely empowered by digital and social media with a wealth of knowledge at their fingertips and a desire to know what is being kept from them. Brands and publishers should take note of something that as Rusbridger himself says will no doubt become an MBA case study in the future.

Product Placement

2009-09-25T08:30:00.000-07:00

A few months ago I wrote in my column in the Eastern Daily Press newspaper about the digital Britain report from the then culture secretary Andy Burnham. He has since been replaced and a lot of his initiatives are slowly being undone by his successor Ben Bradshaw. For example six months ago Burnham said that lifting a ban on product placement in TV programmes raised "very serious concerns ... blurring the boundaries between advertising and editorial" – following a three-month consultation.

Six months is of course a lifetime in modern politics. So I was not that surprised when Bradshaw has now come out and said that he accepts lifting the ban and unveiled a new consultation process. The reason given for this is that “the climate has changed”. Now I know its now autumn but it has not changed that much.

The reality is that this is no surprise. I have written about product placement many times, my favourite being Bond films which are the kings of product placement. If you have the DVD there is a good drinking game around how many times an obvious placement is seen, from an Omega Watch to the classic Aston Martin.

Product placement is now also the norm on America television. Tune into American Idol and you will see Cowell and his American counterparts all drinking Coca Cola with the cup prominent on the jury’s desk. The thing is, because we get so many American shows here in the UK it is happening in the UK already. Most American shows use product placement to earn a bit of extra cash and so when they are shown here, as they largely are, we see it.

There has also long been a market in UK television in giving product for free to be used as props. This has always been a way of getting around the ban on placement and for brand owners, as you did not have to pay to have your label in shot just give free samples, it has been cheaper.

So now they are looking at finally catching up with the rest of the world, will we see Carlsberg in the taps of the Rovers Return? Probably. However it’s not the great money spinner you might think. An early estimate puts the value of product placement to the commercial television market at around £100m a year. This is nothing compared to a total TV ad revenue of nearly £3bn a year.

The problem is that the placement will no doubt still have to be subtle which means it not in your face and so cannot command a premium price. However ITV in the first half of 2009 made a pre-tax loss of £105m and all commercial broadcasters would welcome any new source of revenue.

RIP The Londonpaper

2009-08-28T08:50:00.001-07:00

For anyone who does not live in London, the announced closure of the News International afternoon freesheet thelondonpaper will not mean much. However for anyone living in London, or who goes to London regularly, the closure will see the end of a product that will be genuinely missed.

The title was launched in 2006 in direct competition to Associated's afternoon freesheet London Lite. This heralded the much media discussed "freesheet wars" and also mountains of wasted newsprint. The circulation of thelondonpaper alone is over 500,000 copies a day and add that to the morning Metro and the Lite and you have way over 1.2m free newspapers being taken to recycling centres daily.

When I was Director of marketing for our London newspaper division, one of my favourite sights was seeing tubes full of school kids reading free newspapers. Ok they may not have bought them but it proved to me that the touted "print is dead" theory is of course rubbish. Print is and will not be dead as that showed. Those kids wanted to read it because it was free, put into their hands so they did not have to go out of their way, and it gave them content in a style that they wanted, celebrity focused with light news digests.

The title had some great concepts, from a column from a different reader every day, to having regular columnist sch as gay about town pushing equality in the capital. Some commentators have said that the closure is no great loss as there was no quality content of note in the title. This i believe is missing the point. The title created a readership from nothing and was well read. Unfortunately that readership does not come cheaply.

The paper has over 60 staff excluding all hose who hand it out daily. That 500k print run is not cheap to say the least and news int announced that it had made a pre tax loss of £12.9m in this year alone.

Questions remain as to whether the London Lite will follow or now it is the only afternoon title it will improve its revenues and consolidate its position. Although i hope that Associated will take advantage of its new sole position and gain enough revenues to secure a long term future for the Lite especially now they have sold the Standard. The freesheet wars have been a brave and costly adventure but certainly it proved if only to me that our appetite to read is not diminished - just in a format we want.

Downing Street and Twitter

2009-08-18T01:46:00.000-07:00

Twitter is still managing to achieve more column inches in press coverage than you would expect and many commentators are now praying for the next big thing to finally come along. Just most press agencies go straight to Facebook to lift any photos they can when investigating an individual. So most are now following as many people as possible so they have access to any Tweet that can be quickly used as an unofficial quote.

Politicians especially love this and now you can follow tweets from Number 10, The Foreign Office, the local government department and any number of MP's who want to be seen as "down with the kids". The quality of these understandably vary and so now the government has released a 20 page strategy paper on how to write for Twitter. This has been created by the majestically titles head of corporate digital channels at Lord Mandelson's Department for Business and taking over the world.

To be fair to the paper those companies who are currently paying a lot of money to agencies to advise them on the use of twitter as a marketing could save a lot by finding this on the web. In it it advises correctly that any postings should come from humans rather than dull RSS feeds. That they should be timely and regular at least two per day. They should also be credible and used to present worthwhile information.

Most interesting however is his point about it being used as a minute by minute guide for potential "crisis content". Although this is just a guide once again we have the prospect of Twitter becoming the news service by which people find out first about major crisis updates. If that does happen not only will it close out many users but it will also truly give cause for concern to all traditional news outlets whatever their media base.

what we think of morgan stanley

2009-08-06T08:48:00.000-07:00

You may or may not have seen the swathes of media coverage regarding some 15 year old's view of the world written when he did some summer work at Morgan Stanley. If you have not then you can see the full report here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/jul/13/teenage-media-habits-morgan-stanley

Whether you agree with what he has written or not what has been most interesting is the way the media, us included, has jumped all over this report. Like all reports of this nature it is always worth stepping back and remembering that this is one 15 year old's year and may not necessarily reflect the entire world.

However for an amusing take on this you should read the below and the response from your average 31 year old which i do agree with!
http://www.wilsondan.co.uk/2009/07/17/how-31-year-olds-consume-media/

Brew Dog Tokyo beer

2009-07-30T07:17:00.000-07:00

The biggest marketing event of last week so the announcement of the launch of the "UK's Strongest beer" from Scottish independent brewery Bew Dog. It has relaunched its Tokyo beer at a new high of 18.2% ABV. They saw it celebrates success but the launch as gained a back lash from many alcohol charities calling the launch irresponsible and wrong. The charities have of course missed the point. This launch has nothing to do with selling a few bottles of beer and everything to do with gaining profile for Brew Dog.

As a small independent brewery they operate in a market dominated by massive drinks conglomerates. These guys have marketing budgets in the multi millions which they happily spend on high profile tv campaigns, pub promos and supermarket promotions. So how do you compete with that if you are a small producer working on a small budget in Scotland. In the case of Brew Dog you think smart.

I first became aware of the brand when the two blokes who run it were on the BBC series Oz and James drink Britain. Rather than meeting Oz Clarke and James May in their brewery they met them in a Glasgow park and drank their beer out of brown paper bags as it was illegal to drink their in public. All very cool, all very publicity stunt. With the launch of Tokyo they have done it again. No millions spent but acres of publicity in national and trade press.

This is a great example that you don't have to have a lot of money to create a buzz you do however have to think creatively and that's no bad thing.

Politics and the art of direct mail

2009-07-23T02:00:00.000-07:00

Today i shall be taking my constitutional right and voting in the Norwich North by-election. Although i know i could have already done this through the power of the postal vote, i actually enjoy the ceremony of going to a polling station standing in a box in a school hall and dropping my vote into a box. In my own mind it helps me believe that my vote counts, although that's probably just me.

This by-election, forced by the resignation of the previous mp Ian Gibson, has gained a lot of media coverage due to it being used as a gauge for the next general election that will happen within the next year. Lucky me, two trips to the booth in the space of 12 months! This has meant nice glossy shots of Norwich on the national news and the parties throwing the big wigs into the fray in an attempt to pick up votes. Last night i even had the surprise of having Theresa May and David Cameron himself at my house which is not your average Wednesday night. They did not seem to mind the fact that i had muddy knees as i had been planting Kale a few minutes before they turned up.

What has surprised me in this by-election is the vast quantity of direct mail that has been pushed through my door. In one day alone this week i had 12 pieces of mail including 5 from labour and all of dubious quality. To their credit Anglia TV has picked up on this and and had interviews last night with local postmen who are looking forward to the campaign finishing so they can stop delivering all this stuff, and that excludes all the leaflets that volunteers are wandering around posting through peoples doors.

This must have been a bonanza for the local printers and my pick of the worst has to be the half page in one labour leaflet headed "Chris and Kate are a lovely couple" and the postcard featuring a picture of the Conservative candidate thanking me even if she does not get in????

I am hoping that this deluge is due to the viewed importance of the by-election and is not a sign of things to come. I hope this country does not start to slip down the route of American politics where millions of dollars are spent on television campaigns by all slides slurring each other. Talking to colleagues the mountain of mail has had the opposite effect it intended and has actually stopped people reading. The recent live debate on BBC with the candidates gave much more of an insight into the people who could represent us in parliament, their personalities and views. America has always done that well as seen in the Obamah/McCain debates which i thought were compulsive viewing. Direct mail is an art and done well is a proven marketing tool, this by-election has shown me that all parties have had no artists on their teams.

Extending the o2 brand

2009-07-17T14:54:00.000-07:00

So far, and with a little help from Michael Jackson, the mobile operator O2 has done well with its branding exercises. Lets face it, the spend of many millions to brand the millennium stadium to the O2 was seen by many, apart from the sponsorship head of AEG, to be a potential bum deal. However since it opened its doors the venue has attracted the biggest names in music and hence gained worldwide branding for O2. Jackson would have been the icing on the cake so far, but it was not to be.

O2 has now decide to extend its brand into a new sector and one which made me double take. The operator has now announced that as well as being able to offer you an iPhone they are now moving into the finance sector with pre-paid Visa cards. This new move is in conjunction with NatWest and in essence comes in the form of two pre paid visa cards. The cash manager is aimed at adults who want to keep a close eye on what they spend. The second offering is called Load and Go and is targeted at teenagers from 13 up. The cards are set to be launched with a huge marketing spend including a partnership with Hollyoaks.

Although this may seem a strange move you have to put this into context. This is the first of a range of mobile banking services and they are not the only operator looking at this. Despite the corporate messaging about customer trust and loyalty what this really about it controlling how we spend money. Using our mobiles to pay for things, a common practice in Japan, is not widespread in the UK due to operator concern about bill size. Imagine your mobile bill coming in with the cost of a fridge on it. However imagine if you could link your phone with a pre-paid card which you could use like an Oyster card. You can already see this wireless activity in the Barclaycard ad with the guy going home in the waterslide. This summer will see wireless VISA cards launched in the UK and readers appearing in high street retailers.

The two things we keep closest to us is our wallets and our mobiles. This seemingly strange tie up is just the first of many that will see banks, handset manufacturers and mobile operators trying different ways of creating simple ways for us to spend money. Not only will these pre-paid cards give O2 a new business in a profitable sector it will also allow them to trial new payment methods and give them a head start on the trail for the holy grail of mobile payment systems - one that works.

Take an offline holiday

2009-07-09T14:42:00.000-07:00

Today i have had one of the most interesting days i have had for a long time at a mobile working party meeting in London. I came away buzzing with lots of thoughts and theories that unfortunately stopped me from catching some sleep on the train on the way back to Norwich but one point of discussion keeps coming back to me.

On the train on the way back i sat reading emails from work on my Blackberry and then checking my personal email on my iPhone while checking out the linkedin profiles of some of my fellow working party members. The concept of "always on" is of course nothing new and the curse of the "crackberry" is well known. However how far will this go with the huge expected growth in the sales and use of smartphones. When everyone is permanently connected to the web by a device in their pocket how do we as a society switch off so to speak.

One potential outcome could be a move in holidays where people pay to to go somewhere where they cannot get access to the web. Where Centre Parcs has made a reputation for banning cars and high end hotel chains run TV campaigns pushing the fact that they are adults only how long will it be before one promotes itself as a blackberry free zone. Although many business people would think this will never happen, if they ask their partners i suspect they would get a very different response.......

loose your job with twitter

2009-07-08T10:26:00.000-07:00

As we have already seen in the press this week, posting things online can get you in trouble. So in the week the world has seen the incoming head of MI5 in his Speedo's courtesy of his wife posting pictures all over Facebook we also have the problem with Twitter. It seems that no matter how many examples of personal information accessed by people who shouldn't see it, in this digital age people still don't get it. Eight years ago it was all about people writing emails that then get forwarded onto people who pass them on and suddenly the whole office and world know what you have been upto. Then came Myspace and then Facebook and once again the world has seen no end of examples of embarrassing photos being shared around. So now its Twitter's turn and especially people sending Tweets about their own job and bosses - a dangerous combination.

It seems that the technology changes but the lessons are just not learnt. In simple terms if you would not want your mother or boss to read or see it, don't put it in the digital world as its very easy to get around as the link below proves.

So for 30 ways to loose your job using Twitter use the link below and enjoy:
http://www.resumebear.com/blog/index.php/2009/04/10/30-ways-to-loose-a-job-on-twitter/

Wimbledon and the art of sponsorship

2009-07-06T09:08:00.000-07:00

Yesterday i, like many millions across the world, sat watching the mens finals at Wimbledon. The game itself was far better than most imagined although at the end i noticed the weirdest thing.

Those with sharp eyes may also have noticed this, but having just lost the final, Roddick moved to his chair, sat down and held his face in his hands as you would expect a man whose dreams had just been shattered would do. However the very next thing he did was put his expensive looking watch on. He then got up and acknowledged the crowd, waving his watch wearing arm aloft. Now if i had just lost the final after over 4 hours of exhausting tennis the last thing i would think of would be to slip my watch on straight after the game. In fact i would not have brought the watch out to court with me, i probably would have left it in the locker.

The difference between Roddick and i, apart from the £430k he earned yesterday, is that i am not sponsored by a watch company. Roddick had to make sure that shots of me waving to the crowd had to include my sponsors watch. As the camera panned back to Federer who had changed ready for the presentation, he too had miraculously slipped his watch on ready for the coming photo opps.

This was an oh so subtle yet very clear reminder of the power of sponsorship in modern sport.

McDonalds goes quality (again)

2009-07-03T08:54:00.000-07:00

Having spent a few months watching ads of happy families grow a garden McDonalds is now launching a new campaign to push its good food message. The latest version is to tell us all how McDonalds burgers are made from 100% beef from British and Irish farms.

This is all part of the ongoing campaign from McDonalds as it tries to persuade us all that they make healthy food. Everyone has their own view on the pros and cons of fast food. I myself have always been in the everything in moderation camp and so have no particular axe to grind. I do find myself through feeling more and more empathy with the poor marketing head having to come up with more and more cute campaigns to show the general public how good McDonalds actually are.

Its not an easy job but at least they are making a better job of it than KFC with its terrible latest ad trying to prove a similar point. I have yet to see a KFC that even closely resembles one seen in the latest ad but would be happy to have my mind changed. Mind you i would put a good bet there is a dartboard somewhere in McDonalds head office with Morgan Spurlock's picture on it

mobile growth and mobile ad revenue

2009-07-01T08:19:00.000-07:00

The delay in posting is due to a long needed break in the wilderness of the beaches of Northumberland. Since my return however i have spending time looking at the growth of the mobile market and here are some interesting facts.

There are now 4 billion mobile phones in the world today. Compare that with the total number of televisions (1.5 billion) and personal computers (1.1 billion) and you can see why the mobile internet will be the next big digital boom.

In the worldwide emerging markets the mobile phone is often the first way individuals access not only voice calls but also the internet, news and personal music compared with computers, papers and walkmans in the West.

Mobile advertising revenue in the Euro market is forecast to be a staggering 1.3 billion euros by 2012.

Finally recent research has shown that those with smartphones now use them to access the Internet in their leisure time rather then PC's particularly while watching tv. This is caused by the immediacy of always having the phone with you and convenience of not having to boot up and log in etc.

All this starts to point at how we will use mobile technology to access the internet more and more. This will bring and increasing number of both challenges and opportunities to content providers and marketeers alike.

lies damned lies and online statistics

2009-06-18T06:06:00.000-07:00

When i first started in digital media everybody talked in hits, this then moved to page impressions and then to unique visitors and there is has stayed for a number of years. The common theme to this is quoting the largest possible number to business owners or advertisers. However that number has never truly reflected the engagement with an online offering.

The problem with online traffic is that is is now vast, think of the page impressions Facebook alone generates. But what is the value of those impressions? This growth combined with the recssion has caused the decline in the channel sell of online inventory reducing ad rates significantly.

Simon Waldman from Guardian Media Group has recently openden the loyalty debate once again. In simple terms if you have 100 people visit your site every day and spend an hour on it you have 100 monthly unique visitors. If you have 100 people visiting your site for 2 mins every day for a month you have 3,000 monthly uniques. One is clearly a bigger number but which in effect is more valuable to the site owner and the advertiser?

Right now we are all still chasing U/V's but it was not long ago it was page views and i suspect we will see another change in the next couple of years.

explorer 8 versus chrome battle of the tv ads

2009-06-12T08:48:00.001-07:00

Microsoft and Google are now using TV ads to push their respective new browsers Explorer 8 and Chrome. For those who have not seen these ads, and they are not on in the UK yet, these clearly show the releative positioing of the two options.

For my money Google just win it on creative merit. What do you think??

Microsoft:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyQolo0Xdqw

Google:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHZFsJKlsuA

Iphone and the Tube Strike

2009-06-12T08:32:00.000-07:00

As i have written on here before i am in the middle of a trial of an iphone and have become a complete convert. However despite my almost evangelical zeal for the phone i did manage to become every so slightly annoyed with it while in London on Wenesdays tube strike.

On the train on the way to London i knew that the strike was on and that the inevitable would happen and all the buses and cabs would be packed. So resigned to walking an hour from Liverpool Street to Covent Garden for a meeting i planned to route into my iphone. Having found the route functions on the phone it duly plotted a course which i could take by foot, car or public transport. I then thought that it would take me GPS style to my destination. Unfortunately it did not seem to do that

To be fair the GPS did always tell me where i was and the mapping was very good however there was one thing that beat it. When i got to the station i was handed a map, an old school printed map. It was the map that i used to get to covent garden not the iphone.

Despite this slight knockback in my affections it still remains an amazing bit of kit and the slight disappointment with the mapping was not so bad when i used Streetview on the way back. Certainly with the announcement of a compass in the new version the mapping and GPS will only get better and the rumoured tie up with Tom Tom will strengthen Apple's position in the smartphone marketplace.

Flogos of desire

2009-06-09T06:06:00.000-07:00

Although the property market looks like it is starting to turn itself around in a similar style to the Exxon Valdiz, my marketing options for http://www.homes24.co.uk/ are limited due to budgets. This is a reality for most marketeers as we have to look to make more effective use of the budgets available to us whatever industry we work in.

I am long enough in the tooth to remember the last recession and having to work with tight budgets and i am a firm believer in how this can be a good thing. Since the last recession the media options for marketeers has increased exponentially giving more ways to spend your budget. Unfortunately this makes it harder both to get your message across to a confused and media swamped consumer base and also harder to justify which areas to spend on. This current recession has taught many marketeers the back to basic principles of spending on things that can deliver results and more importantly that can prove they are delivering. The whole PPC market and indeed online advertising world is based on this.

Despite this however i still occasionally see items of desire and Flogos are just that. Flogos are promotional logos made from a combination of soap and gas normally helium. When inflated they float up to heights of 5,000 feet and last for 30 to 40 minutes before dissolving into thin air. Mercedes, Disney and McDonald's have supposedly already used them send their names up in lights.

Yes its a fad and yes a little bit silly but sitting here in Norwich the thought of hundreds of branded flogos flying over the city does bring a smile to my face.

To see them in action go here: http://www.flogos.net/

Norwich Union to Aviva its all in a name

2009-06-05T08:17:00.000-07:00

Norwich Union has now re-branded its UK sites to its new worldwide brand Aviva. This is another step on the journey as it re-brands all its various worldwide brands under the single Aviva moniker. As part of this it is attempting to manage a common approach to managing all its online assets worldwide. This encompasses 28 countries and more than 50 million customers. The online re-brand is probably one of the most important parts of this re-brand due to the high use of the internet for insurance purposes from research to purchase.

The big problem Aviva will have is the change of domains. No doubt behind the scenes there will have been lots of people with Gant charts, visio drawings and scraps of paper trying to make sure every page has been migrated, the right re-directs all all in place and fingers crossed. I also suspect that to counter act any negative effect of changing the main domain with natural search Aviva will have considerably upped its PPC activity against core terms to negate any potential traffic loss.

Changes pages within a website, if you use the correct re-directs normally has a minimal impact on your natural rankings. However changing your domain can have serious implications if not thought through. The best example i have ever read regarding this is when econsultancy, a site targeted at digital marketeers especially search engine specialists, moved from e-consultancy.com to econsultancy.com as part of a major relaunch of its site. It took 10 weeks for all their positions to come back so i hope NU sorry Aviva do not suffer the same fate.

If you want to read about the econsulatcncy migration and SEO nightmare this is well worth a read: http://tinyurl.com/dznrvk

Hay Literary Festival and the Sony EReader

2009-06-04T09:01:00.000-07:00

In the Welsh county of Powys there is a small town that has two claims to fame. Firstly it has over 30 bookshops and secondly, because of that, it is the home of the world famous Hay-on-Wye Literary festival. At the festival, which finished last Sunday, you can wander between tents listening to a range of speakers from Stephen Fry to Desmond Tutu, Jeremy Clarkson in one tent and Harry Hill next to Bill Clinton in another. The festival is such big news now that its main sponsor is the Guardian and it has daily coverage of the speakers, debates and events on Sky TV Arts Channel

Of course a festival that can attract this level of heavyweight speakers also attracts a fair amount of sponsorship and one of the main sponsors this year is Sony. Specifically it is promoting its ebook reader the Sony Reader. This little electronic device can store up to 160 ebooks and, with Amazons Kindle reader, among many digital book readers available now.

Publishing executives are watching with keen interest the growth of e-book readers as unlike the internet where most content is available for free, ebooks are charged for. Yes the readers tend to come with a range of out of copyright texts but new e-books cost as much as your average paperback and many in the publishing world are looking at this as a whole new growth channel for the publishing world.

Imagine not having to worry about the weight and size of books when you pack for your holidays. All you need to do is download 4 or 5 or even more books to your book reader that is less than an A4 pad in size and pack that in your hand luggage. You are happy as you have less to carry and the publishers are happy as you have bought each one and they have not had to print them or distribute them so they make more profit. Now you can see the appeal for the publishers.

Its not only the book world that is getting excited. Rupert Murdoch recently announced that News International is going to spend time, effort and money to try and make people pay for newspaper content online. This will not be easy, but in America people seem to be happy to pay for newspaper subscriptions to read their paper of choice on the Kindle device. This has been so successful that Amazon has now launched a larger tablet version of the Kindle to make it easier to read larger formats such as newspapers. Whether this will take off in the UK remains to be seen but many in the UK are hoping it does.

Amazon’s Kindle is only currently available in the US which is why Sony are moving fast with its reader as unlike the Kindle it is not wireless and does not offer newspaper and magazines. The Kindle scores highly there, wirelessly updating itself while you are on the move. The latest rumour is that Apple is looking at a tablet rival which could become the publishing equivalent of the ipod.

Technology aside, whether people will convert and actually use them will be the main driving force for growth in this new market. As part of the sponsorship for Hay festival Sony is running workshops and panel discussions as well as a trial area for anyone interested in seeing them work. At the moment with the Sony device at £219 and the Kindle in the US at £310 price will also be an issue. However as more devices are launched and prices come down publishers of both newspapers and books are hoping this could create a whole new literary world and a nice revenue stream in the process.

Virgin media and the pg tips monkey

2009-06-02T09:33:00.000-07:00

Sometimes if you cannot come up with a good idea of your own in marketing what you can do is steal a really good one and make it different enough so people think its your own. Unfortunately for Virgin TV Media it looks like they have tried this with something a little bit too iconic.

The two characters i most identify with on television at the moment are Stewie from Family Guy and the monkey from the PG Tips ads. Monkey is now in its second incarnation having been created to promote the now defunct ITV digital. At the time it was the best thing about the failed digital offering as anyone who purchased the service got a free monkey. When they went bust there was a brisk market for Monkey's on ebay. In 2007 Monkey was re-born, along with Johnny Vegas, after PG Tips paid the agency Mother who created the character for the rights to use him. Once again Monkey has become famous and i even have one hanging from my fridge.

Virgin Television is just about to go through a marketing re-vamp including a new logo and as part of this they have got the creator of Monkey to create a new character called Red. The new character is red, funnily enough, and imp like and surprise surprise made of the same knitted material as Monkey. Virgin will be using red in a range of idents and adverts to promote this re-launch and they have already announced it will be on Facebook, Twitter and have its own podcasts. So tick for covering all the expected social media marketing boxes but not for originality.

I may be hopelessly wrong on this but i was always taught that there is nothing wrong with stealing great ideas, just be careful about which one you copy.

Decision engines and Chandler Bing

2009-05-29T08:35:00.000-07:00

Today we have had the announcement regarding the long awaited search engine from Microsoft. This for a long time was under the codename Kumo but now they have launched it with an equally ridiculous name. Once upon a time Bing was just the surname of a man called Chandler who had the pleasure and pain of being married to Monica in Friends. Now however the word Bing will also be associated with Microsoft's latest attempt to crack the search engine market.

As the engine is not live i cannot comment on it apart from to say that as much as it pains me to say it, i like the fact they are describing it a "decision engine". The problem Microsoft have is summed up in one word: dominance, the dominance of a certain Google. Its search engine is the main way that most people on the planet search the web. It is a true "search engine". By calling Bing a "decision engine" and positioning it as an alternative to Google and as a tool to help individuals find information to make decisions it at least gives them a positioning statement to build a marketing campaign around.

That marketing campaign is what i am really looking forward to as Microsoft's campaigns have started slowly but surely to become much more innovative and encompassing. Its last two campaigns: the "I'm a PC" campaign, to the latest one featuring young children showing how easy it to use PC software have been the best so far. Big spenders as they are the world launch budget for Bing is going to be a reputed $100m so look out for a range activity in the UK soon.

If you want to learn more about Bing you can watch the promo video here: http://www.decisionengine.com/Default.html.

If you want to watch something better however why not spend 20 mins in the company of the original bing and his best bits here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0atFVSyMxE and here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xecz60eU1v4&feature=related

Google and the country of origin

2009-05-28T05:34:00.001-07:00

This blog was created as part of research into the best route forward to create a blog for one of our classified sites http://www.homes24.co.uk/. As it is we are building that using Wordpress.org and the Thesis theme. However the lessons i am learning from running this have been very useful, from how to install Google Analytics, to the latest when i realised that the site has dropped completely from Google index of pages from the UK.

Of course i should not have been surprised as this is a .com address and hosted in America, it is just a blogger free site. However despite this, i just presumed that it would rank equally when using google.co.uk and searching "the web" as when searching "pages from the uk". On investigation Google makes it clear that you can set preference for where your site is targted in Webmaster tools if the domain is not the country of origin.

As we have a number of sites that are .com and hosted in America i asked our search consultant Just Beerekamp at Traffic4U, our natural search agency, for his comments. So if you were not aware here are some handy pointers:

"Google uses various indicators to determine a country or language a website is targeting. Common factors are:
- Top Level Domain (.com for US or International, .co.uk for England, .nl for the Netherlands etc.)
- Location of server (determined by IP address)
- Language on the website itself
- META-language tag

Apart from these there is a more important factor, the origin of the incoming links. If your website receives many links from websites in some country your website is bound to target that country (according to Google). Therfore link, you need accumulate more link from UK oriented websites.

Also If you're sure that your site only targets the UK then it's wise to target the site to the UK in webmaster tools"

So if you have a .com site and you are really only targeting the UK make sure you let Google know that in your webmaster tools to make sure you rank.

Nokia, Ovi and catching up with the iphone

2009-05-26T05:44:00.000-07:00

I am currently playing with an iphone for a month to check out both how people are using it and what opportunities are there for the mobile platform for a regional newspaper group. Having had the phone for a paltry three days i have to say that i am already hooked. I could waste time rambling about how cool the phone, how good the mobile web browser is etc but you can read that elsewhere or just borrow one of a friend.

One of the drivers of the take up of the iphone has been the applications you can download onto the phone. This has been backed by the usual high quality of campaigns to promote how these apps can improve your life. From choosing a cab to finding a restaurant to working out a tip there are thousands of apps available both paid and free and that number grows daily. Of course the Google Android phone also allows you to run apps and unlike the iphone on Android the apps are open source so you can get them from other places apart from the locked down Apple App Store. Add to that the blackberry and windows app offerings and you can see that mobile applications is a burgeoning business.

Missing from this list though is the giant Nokia who sells around 40 million handsets a year compared to the iphones 20 million. However this week Nokia launches the amusingly called Ovi which sounds like a children's TV animation but is in fact its own App store. It is being launched this week in Some European countries and Singapore and will roll out across the world quickly.

Nokia has been slow of the mark with this despite the clear market dominance they enjoy. Having this huge number of handsets should create an immediate market for the store and a new revenue stream for Nokia but it will depend on how Nokia markets Ovi. T-Mobile launched the Google Android phone with a lot of people dancing together in Liverpool Street Station. This was very memorable but did not explain why you should buy one and every day the campaign was on i was also exposed to ads from Apple showing me how the iphone could improve my life through not just being a phone.

So Nokia although late to market has a great opportunity and i look forward to interest to see what messages and channels they use to push this new competitor to the iphones crown. If you want to know more feel free to visit here http://store.ovi.com/ however as a word of warning i dont think it has launched in the UK yet as i have already registered my phone but there seems to be no apps available yet so watch this space.

Facebook presents "delete or not to delete that is the question"

2009-05-23T15:11:00.001-07:00

While watching My Name is Earl last night i laughed as the character Darnell set himself up on the fictional social media site "Buddy Book" because all the "old people" had now got onto Facebook and Myspace. You see there are various reasons why i have no personal presence in the world of social media. It is my job to understand them all and so i do have dummy accounts that i use to see how the technology is being used and developing and more importantly how they could and are being used as a marketing channel. But personal accounts, no way.

There are a couple of reasons for this. Firstly when i used to have personal accounts for Myspace and Facebook etc i could not keep up with them and also could never understand the correct digi social etiquette for rejecting a friend request from someone you had spent years trying to avoid but who had managed to find you online. Secondly working in the regional press i am acutely aware that if anything unfortunate ever happened to me, whereas 10 years ago my next of kin would have been asked for a picture, today journalists go for the easy option. That option is to see what photos are online, especially ones that i would not want shared.

It amazes me on a regular basis how many people are caught out by posting images of themselves in dubious circumstances or situations which then miraculously end up in the public domain. Of course you can delete any images that you would not want your mother to see or the whole world for that matter. However recent research from Cambridge University shows that even if you delete them they may not be as out of reach as you think.

A group of researchers put photographs on 16 popular websites, noted the exact url's of the photos and then deleted them. They then checked 30 days later and managed to find the photos on 7 sites including the behemoth Facebook. As you can imagine this created a whole pile of press and forced Facebook to come out and make the following statement:

"When a user deletes a photograph from Facebook it is removed from our servers immediately.
"However, URLs to photographs may continue to exist on the Content Delivery Network (CDN) after users delete them from Facebook, until they are overwritten. Overwriting usually happens after a short period of time."

What that means in English is that your facebook pictures do not sit on one single but enormous computer in California. The reality is that they use storage facilities across the world and that picture that you deleted because in the cold light of day you realised that your prospective employer, partner, pet (delete as you will) would not think too highly of you if they saw it, could actually be stored anywhere.

They do of course eventually get deleted but would you have put them up there in the first place if you knew it could take 30 days before you hitting delete and them actually leaving the web. To be clear they come off your profile straight away but if you know the url of the picture then they will still be there.

The basic reason for this is the cost that these networks would occur if they had to delete photos from the whole network the minute a user wants them. To do that would involve a huge investment in process, server technology etc etc and to be fair you have to know the actual url of the photo after it has been deleted to stand a chance of finding it.

So this situation is not going to change, indeed if the figures on the usage of Facebook are to be believed then it may well get worse with more photos online hiding in the "cloud" of the modern web. So can i advise those of you that do have social media sites or even use image sites such as Flickr or Picassa (they came out quite well btw) check what you are uploading to them. My advice would be if you would not want your mother or your boss to see the photo don't put it online, especially if you don't want it to end up in the papers if anything happens.

Google new search options and universal search

2009-05-20T08:23:00.000-07:00

Google has added a new featured to its search listings albeit without a lot a fuss. If you look underneath the Google logo on a search results page above the first listings you will now see a text link stating "show options".

When clicked on this introduces a new range of search filters allows users to select results from videos, forums, reviews, and also by various time criteria i.e. past 24 hours of past year. I mentioned Google's move to Universal search in my post regarding the Wolframalpha search engine and this is another step towards that.

An excellent view and description of this new development, far better than i can explain, and including a link to a Googles video explaining the new options can be found on the Further blog from Mark Cook its search marketing director which is well worth a read here: http://www.furtheronline.co.uk/blog/New-Google-Search-Options-132

O2, the Joggler and the family fridge

2009-05-20T03:35:00.000-07:00

Last night my eye was drawn to a new campaign from O2 promoting its calendar service and associated product the Joggler. Like all good campaigns it made me want to find out more about the service which allowed you to organise your life through a device that ran a family diary and sent sent reminder texts to your phones for important dates etc.

The reality of the service is that you of course need to be registered with O2 and have an O2 phone to get the best benefit. Although if you are, you do not need to shell out £149 for the Joggler itself you can just use the calendar app on your PC. So once you realise that you don't need the Joggler box to use the calendar what is left?

Well the box can store and display photo's and can be used as a music player (however it does not supported Apples AAC format). Digital radio is coming in December so hard luck if you buy one now and it has traffic updates from traffic master (useful in a kitchen) and news from sky news.

The advert tries to explain that the Joggler allows you to clear up all the clutter from the family fridge from children's pictures to reminders. Of course as someone with a 13 month old, what they have forgotten is that i don't want to see a picture of what my Son has created on a digital screen, its actually nice to see the real thing.

I hope that this was another attempt at creating a digital hub for the home rather than just creating a product because they could, but i fail to see how this justifies its place on that journey. It is limited in its application and you can do more things by having a notebook permanently in the kitchen which might cost a bit more but it would do an awful lot more. The ability to access the web for recipes for a start!

If you are on O2 for your mobile phone then the calendar, which can be found here: http://yourfamily.o2.co.uk/o2familycalendar), would be a very useful tool however i would stick to that and ignore the joggler.

WolframAlpha versus Google

2009-05-18T08:21:00.000-07:00

Over the last two years there has been a number of new search engines that have been launched that have claimed to be able to take Google's crown. Many have tried, lured sometimes though a desire of the creator to make the world a better place. Most however have been created to try and get access to the revenues that Google enjoys as the world's search engine of choice.

The latest to join this list is a search engine created by a British scientist Stephen Wolfram, a British computer scientist now based in Illinois. His new engine is the web’s first “computational knowledge engine”. In English that means that it only holds factual data and all the data has come from official websites, libraries and academic journals, and checked by experts.

It is getting a lot of hype because the engine that drives it can link every piece of information in its database to other bits of information that are related. So for example if you type in GDP Spain not only do you get text results based on those keywords but it also brings back graphs and also related content such as economic reports. So from plain English questions you get detailed academic results.

Looking at the engine now it looks like a tool for academics rather than those who just want to find a picture of Paris Hilton. Google indexes the whole web which means the dross as well as the valuable stuff, reporting results in an order based on a range of variables. This new engine just looks at the factual. What this means is by definition it will be limited in its content and i suspect use, although a targeted search engine for research is no bad thing. However its the process of linking data of different types to a plain English input could be he start of the next generation of how we search online. Google started this with its Universal search project and this looks like another step on the way.

Check it out here: www.wolframalpha.com

Murdoch and the war against free content

2009-05-15T08:01:00.000-07:00

The different between the PC based Internet and the mobile based internet is the cost of content. In the pc internet world people have got used to not pay for content. If they want news they can go to hundreds of newspaper sites or content sites and even places like Google news which links to all the top stories and just reads them. They do not have to pay they just have to accept that the content will have ads around them. On mobiles people stated to get used to paying for content via micro payments such as an enhanced text message cost.

Now with the rise of smart and internet enabled phones publishers are once again giving their content away free. On my mobile within two clicks i can read all the news from the BBC, The Sun, The Guardian and Sky and all for free. However for the news international titles among them that may not be for much longer.

In a recent Q&A session with journalists Murdoch announced that he intends to sort out the "freebie" culture of news on the internet and to start progressively introduce charging models and fee structures on his online newspaper portfolio that includes The Times Online, The Sun and The News of the World.

The business model so far for newspapers has been to give the content away, build an audience and then monetise that audience predominantly though digital display ads. Unfortunately virtually all have not managed to make the same revenues as the print products which are still supporting the cost of the content creation hence the current round of massive reduction in costs seen across the newspaper industries and especially the regional press industry.

Murdoch has one model in the Wall Street Journal which has managed to increase its circulation and also charge for its online content but it is very specific in its content nature. If anyone can succeed it will be Murdoch and the £3.6bn in cash he has in his empire to fund trials of different business models. Media owners will be watching this with keen interest as if he can make this work they will all follow and this will probably spare thousands of journalists from loosing their jobs around the world.

So the next year will see whether Mr Murdoch really can be Citizen Cane or whether the great newspaper man of our time will turn into the next King Canute.

To Twitter or not to Twitter that is the question

2009-05-14T08:06:00.000-07:00

Once again i have been dragged into argunments recently about Twitter and more specifically its value as a tool for marketing. So just to make my position clear i have copied below my April Eastern Daily Press column in which i set out my views on the subject.

It is worth noting that since then a poll on Marketing Weeks magazine website has 44.4% of marketing professionals thinking it is a significant tool and an equal 44.2% thinking ot with 11% unsure yet. Certainly in America a new poll by Harris has speculated that because of the recent media hype and take up by everyone from Martha Stewart to Opra Winfrey the younger age groups are now leaving Twitter to look for the next cool thing.

Anyway here's the column and if you agree or disagree feel free to comment or email me your views at timyoungman@gmail.com

I was recently asked by a colleague about creating a feed on Twitter for one of our commercial sites. For those who don’t know, Twitter is a micro blogging site, micro because each post has to be less than 140 characters. It has become extremely famous very quickly as it has become the darling of the media. Every celebrity known to mankind seems to have their own twitter page and the media does love to write about it. Sky News even has a twitter correspondent for crying out loud.

Twitter was designed for friends to let each other know what they are doing in brief statements. However research from O2 has shown that UK businesses are sending about 3m posts a day with 700,000 business using the services. But what are they saying? In effect they are saying very little to a small amount of people who are not interested. It is just the next big thing and another bandwagon that businesses think they should be on. Don’t get me wrong Twitter for individuals can be fun, even the voyeuristic pleasure of reading posts written by celebrities themselves not the distorted and re-interpreted words from celebrity magazines is interesting. However a marketing tool it is not.

A couple of years ago Second Life, the online virtual world, was all the flavour. Thousands of businesses paid a lot of money to create their own environments within this virtual world but now two years down the line many are pulling out. Why, because they simply cannot justify the expense. The Department for Work and Pensions has had to defend publicly its “waste” of tens of thousands of pounds of taxpayers' money in building a government “innovations centre” in this virtual land. The users moved on to the next cool thing. Second Life “jumped the shark” (it’s a colloquialism, look it up in Wikipedia) and Twitter will be next. Ever since Jonathon Ross banged on about it on his show and Stephen Fry and Philip Schofield made it famous, the early adopters, those that many businesses want to target, decided to move on to the next big thing.

Geoffrey Moore, in his 1991 book Crossing the Chasm, created a life cycle for successful technology products and named groups of users based on the timing of the use of that technology. These are innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority and eventually onto laggards. Twitter is current moving into early majority but it needs to make money. In reality most of today's social networking businesses will struggle to make a viable business. Evan Williams, one of the team behind Twitter has said “We will make money, but we can't predict exactly what's going to work,” Which is great when you get multi-million funding boosts but not when they run out.

Web 2.0 history is now starting to get littered with social sites, from Friends Re-united, Pandora, Bebo, Second Life, MySpace, Flickr, You Tube, Facebook and now Twitter. All in their time have been heralded as the future of the web and the next Google in terms of revenue potential. Some have been lucky to have been bought for millions of pounds ensuring that their creators retire in luxury. However although some still have vast audiences none have lived up to the hype. There is always something else just around the corner.

So for any business who is thinking they must be on twitter, ask yourself, why do you really want to be on it? Who are you trying to attract and what are you going to say? And is there some better way of communicating with your target consumers? My advice would be sign up, but just to find out what Philip and Steven are doing today as tomorrow they will probably be on something else.

Audioboo, podcasts, Flickr and the search for an image

2009-05-12T06:07:00.000-07:00

Due to the fact that i have to spend most of today working on a board presentation regarding digital strategy that is hurting my head i will keep today's post short.

Last night I managed to create a debate regarding the vlaue of a service that allows you to create what are effectively mini podcasts from the iPhone. This in itself is not that exciting, what is though is the fact that the app then allows you to tag the audio with a photo, title and tags and also available geo location data. I personally thought this was a very useful tool and could point the future for both podcasts and also potential development for twitter on which i have certain views. Certain collegues disagreed but if you want to learn more you can get it here: http://bestbefore.tv/2008/01/welcome-to-audioboo/

Just to re-dress the balance here is the most fun site i have seen for a while that allows you to spell out words from photos on Flickr. Have a play here it can be very funny:

http://metaatem.net/words/

EBay, Archaeology and Fakes

2009-05-11T06:33:00.000-07:00

My favourite story of the day regards a metal detector who has been jailed for selling fakes http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article6261804.ece. Of course it is sad when someone decides to con others especially when he is trading off his reputation as a renowned finder of rare items. If you are interested in what he did read the article on the Times site before Mr Murdoch decides to implement a charging mechanism and watches his visitor count plummet.

Most interesting to me was the link between this and another article which appeared on archaeology.org an American archaeology site. Here a Professor Stanish has written regarding the fact that eBay has not become the source of all evil that most in the time team supporting fraternity thought it would.

When eBay launched, many thought that the fact that you could buy antiquities online direct from those who found them would encourage a rise in looting and people running off the Egypt to come back with statues stuffed down your trousers. In fact what it has down has created a world of online fakes. Why travel the world when you can knock up a knock off in the shed at the bottom of the garden. It seems those people who used to go off looting and sell what they found to middlemen now sell fakes direct with a lot less risk as you cannot be nicked for importing forgeries only if you get caught selling them.

In the paper Stanish states:
"because the low-end antiquities market has been flooded with fakes that people buy for a fraction of what a genuine object would cost, the value of the real artefacts has gone down as well, making old-fashioned looting less lucrative."

I'm off to buy that fake pyramid now!

Google Streetview, Property and spare time

2009-05-08T03:27:00.000-07:00

As one of my responsibilities is a property website www.homes24.co.uk i often get to spend time looking at competing property portals to see what they are doing. This is of course quite boring unless you do it linked to that great English pastime of checking property prices near you, searching for property you can afford and looking at others that would require a lottery fortune.

Last night i was looking at such properties and found what looked like the rural cottage not far from Norwich in my price range. Before the internet i would not have even seen that unless i had happened upon an ad in the paper. Now it seems commonplace to see these things online. Last night however was the first time property hunting became really interesting.

Luckily unlike many agents, this one had provided the postcode of the property plus further map details in the online brochure. This meant that i could use google maps with the satellite view activated to find the property and see at least an overhead view of it to get a sense of its position. This again is nothing new and has been available on Google and indeed integrated into many property portals sites for a few years. What was different though was the addition of Google streetview.

I knew that the streetview service was available in 50 UK cities and they are slowly rolling it out so i did not expect it to work in this rural spot. Sure enough when i tried it over the property Google duly informed me that Streetview did not extend that far. However as i moved towards Norwich on the map i managed to activate streetview and turn round back to the cottage. Despite being told from the map/satellite view that streetview was not available i actually managed to "walk" right up to the property and take a good look at it virtually.

The result was that i realised the art of the estate agent was not dead because as good as it looked online and in the brochure with the numerous pictures they did not show the sub station right behind the house. Also the complete lack of back garden with dark north facing back of the house. So apart from saving me a trip on Saturday it clearly shows that Google is slowly but surly extending streetview albeit making it difficult to find that out.

Unlike the Daily Mail i actually believe Streetview is a real leap forward, not a threat to our privacy. Its uses with positioning software is the most exciting technology of this year, especially when linked to a mobile phone. When demonstrating the service Google showed the system on an Andriod phone allowing a user to tell the system to look for restaurants and then walk down a street with a virtual street on the phone taking you straight to your eateries of choice. When this is all linked to Ad Words and Ad Sense and Google positioning ads you can see why they are spending literally millions on this.

This technology is very much in its infancy but in a couple of years time it will be mainstream and not only will we never be lost again trying to find that bar in London but we will also will not be frustrated with a wasted house viewing.

Baking Cookies and the Web

2009-05-07T02:31:00.000-07:00

Last night in my continuing decision to improve my skills i decided to bake cookies. This was partially because i wanted to teach myself how to bake but also following some web based inspiration.

Over the last few years i have really enjoyed not only growing vegetables but learning the art of cooking. This has come from the usual sources of inspiration from TV chefs such as Jamie and Hugh. However i have always stopped short of deserts of any kind. I can knock out a range of starters and some great main courses learnt and adapted but deserts scared me.

They scared me because of the need for precision. No throwing an extra pinch of thyme in here or there, no things have to be measured and accurate. I don’t mind that at work, its part of the job especially when you are dealing with budgets but when i am at home cooking i prefer a little more freedom.

However as a grown man i felt this was something i needed to get over and so last night i entered the world of baking, starting easy with chewy oatmeal and raisin cookies. As a first attempt i was quite pleased although i will definitely be adding a lot more cinnamon and some nutmeg next time. As you can see from the picture, i brought a few into the office this morning and they were well received by my colleagues so ginger cake next.

The point of this however was more about how i found the recipe. Rather than just resorting to wading through numerous cook books I simply went online and searched for a chewy oatmeal and raisin cookies and bang along comes hundreds of sites all with different variations on a theme.

Cooking is big online and getting bigger. I have added a couple of links to foodgawker that links to different sites and CakeSpy blog has more than 100,000 visitors a month! Some cookery blogs are run for fun and some look extremely professional and are clearly run by people who have learnt how to make their blog look a lot more professional than my humble attempt.

Its clear to see that there is a growing appetite (forgive the pun) for food online and not just people looking at the major sites like BBC Food or Market Kitchen. As someone who understands that cookery is actually about trial and error and learning from others i can only applaud those people who diligently update and add new recipes to their own blogs so that people like myself can try and lean. So if you have not already looked I can recommend spending a happy lunchtime reading the different cookery blogs - you will not regret it.

Sainsburys, Pollack and Marketing tricks - EDP COLUMN - May 2009

2009-05-05T08:21:00.000-07:00

This was of course written before the sad event that was the relegation of NCFC to the third tier of English football. As I have tried to explain to others you cannot chose your family or your football team, they come with birth. Supporting Norwich was passed to me by my father and I will pass it to my son but with a larger dose of realism. Enjoy......

Published Eastern Daily Press May 6th 2009. - yes i know this is going up before publication date but i wrote it!

By the time you read this you will already know whether I will be feeling the same pain I felt in 1985 and again in 2005. So it’s probably quite fortunate that my deadline means that I will not pepper this column with sad/glorious anecdotes (depending on the outcome of last Monday) regarding NCFC. Instead I am dedicating this column to the brilliantly mad marketers at Sainsbury’s.

Recently Tesco announced that they were enjoying weekly sales of over £1bn a week and annual profits of more than £3bn. This is despite being in an ongoing media battle with Morrisons and Asda on who is cheapest. All three forcing us to watch ads regarding the average cost of a shopping basket, great price crunch deals and now spotty teenage Asda workers telling us how they are amazed how cheap everything is in their store.

To be fair Sainsbury’s is on the same bandwagon albeit with the classic female worker who also is a caring mum and the odd appearance from the almighty Jamie. However they are also coming up with surprising strategies based around product ranges the latest being Pollack, yes the fish.

Sainsbury’s have re-branded Pollack to Colin. Now to be totally clear, that’s Colin as in Colin Powell the American ex-General not Colin as in Jackson or Firth. This is the French name for the fish when it is cooked and supposedly it has a much higher gastronomic reputation with our Gallic cousins than here where it has traditionally been deemed cat food. It seems that if we eat as much Pollack, nee Colin, as the French it would have a major positive effect on our cod stocks. Especially as it is much more plentiful and cheaper than the more popular cod and haddock.

Sainsbury’s are urging shoppers to “try Colin and chips on a Friday” and even hired designer Wayne Hemmingway of Red or Dead fame to create new packaging for the line. His new Jackson Pollock inspired packaging (creative thinking at its best there) is used right across the line from packaged fish to Colin fish fingers.

So why would I call the marketers at Sainsbury’s brilliantly mad. I do of course applaud the effort to support sustainable sourcing and protecting dwindling fish stocks by promoting a more unfashionable yet more sustainable and plentiful fish. However it is more to do with the fact that before you go rushing off to your nearest Sainsbury’s they were actually only running this as a trial in 10 stores to gauge consumer reaction. Of course the acres of media space they gained from this would suggest differently but that is why they gain the brilliantly mad tag from me.

They could have taken the easy route and pointed out how much cheaper their Pollack is compared with Tesco or Aldi. This route though gives them massive media coverage, lets them boast about their green credentials and will probably help them sell a pile of fish if it is rolled out across the UK.

So hats off to the marketers at Sainsbury’s, they broke the golden rule of re-branding i.e. don’t do it unless you really, really, really have to. FYI it’s always better to realign an existing brand with what your customers want than start afresh with all the associated costs. They turned a re-branding into a major marketing coup and a clever one at that. They used an obscure product line to cut through the clutter of the current supermarket promotional messages and that is very clever.

I hope I keep this up

2009-05-05T07:49:00.000-07:00

I started working in the media and specifically online in the mid 1990's and have watched the rise of various new toys from blogs to social media, web 2.0 and I could go on. I never bothered to run my own blog for many reasons, many of them the same as to why i am not on Facebook or Twitter. I have tried them all for my job to see what commercial benefit they had and then deleted my accounts. A blog is only really a blog if it is updated and that takes commitment.

I used to have a weekly column in a regional paper in England called the Eastern Daily Press and that allowed me a creative outlet for all those comments I occasionally need to air. That is now a monthly column and yet the desire is still there so i now have this. The problem with understanding the internet is the knowledge that this will be visible to the world including potential and current employers and journalists. So I promise to keep this regular, relevant and hopefully vaguely amusing. At least the vegetable tips may prove useful.

To find out more about what i am up to visit here : http://www.linkedin.com/in/timyoungman