Humping The (new) Media Landscape

No Emoticon

A Manifesto.

 It is not too late to say what you feel.

Every time you let one of those little emoticons slip into your technologically mediated communications you let a little bit of your humanity slip away. An emoticon is an inadequate and irresponsible stand in for real emotions. And more so, it is an insult to the human ability to express.

Each of us, currently has the right to speak about how we feel to each other. And we have a right to transmit that, in most cases, through a variety of text-based medium. Do not take that lightly. Your personal communications are political. There have been times and there are places today, where you must us symbols to stand in for feelings in order to avoid persecution.

The ability to express is not a given politically nor is it a given practically; we must learn it though practice and experimentation.

Consider each emoticon you choose to eliminate, as an exercise in freedom and practice of expression. Practice the written expression of your emotions with abandon! Use language. At a loss for words? Then say that, or explore a thesaurus. Make up language, if the words you find won’t do. Every colon followed by closed parentheses is a missed opportunity for an expression of human joy. Just think about all the deliciously, salty language experiences we miss out on when someone chooses to express themselves with a semi-colon, closed parentheses rather than a full description of their thoughts at that moment.

Emoticons are feelings for computers. And you, as much as, you may like to think otherwise, are not a computer. Fundamental our experience as a humans, is attempting to express feeling, failing or succeeding, and in the process, creating beauty and understanding. Trust that the thoughtful choice of words will mean, as much if not more, than the immediacy of your response, for every emoticon you eliminate from your communications is a small heroic human act.  

Marketer of the Year

Ad Age names Team Obama Marker of The Year.

Gotta say, I agree.
It's an impressive strategy in a very difficult environment - take notes, people!

The Obama iPhone app is a pretty microsite that includes all the tools any ad hoc Obama canvaser would need. Most notably there is a Call Friends link that lets you score Obama Points (note sure what they are redeemable for exactly? I guess, a better future for your children?) for calling friends numbers, identified from your phone book as being in key states.

Battle at National Geographic: liveblogging OMMA Global

KeyNote: Rob Covey, SVP of Content Development and Design - National Geographic Digital Media

National Geographic is doing a lot to extend their content across platforms. Rob is showing some of the ways they have opened up their site to user generated content in a way that doesn't devalue the National Geo brand. They have been working with this longer than many content companies.

I wonder if the reason why this came more hmmm... shall we say, naturally, to them is because they are concerned with getting out an overall message to the public. This presentation even began with a video of employees explaining that they are passionate about these efforts because it helps with their goal of getting people to see and care about the natural environment. They have a clear goal as to why they are doing these things that is, of course tempered by $$, but is ultimately larger. I can see why that would  keep a team excited and focused on creating these kinds of campaigns.

Nice to hear someone talking about meaningful experiences with content.

He made a point to express that they are making efforts to monitize all of this especialy since they now have a sweet TV/Print/Web package to offer. Also that all of this is not without the many challenges that everyone faces in this area.

We just watched a video about the elusive Snow Leopard ( Note that ngm site I linked to is built on Typepad!). I want to be a Snow Leopard.

Video: Hyper-Distribution or Hype?:liveblogging OMMA Global

liveblogging OMMA Global Moderator:
Gary Gannaway, CEO, WorldNow
Speakers:
Chris Allen, VP, Director of Video Innovation, Starcom
Mike Henry, SVP, Veoh
Eric Hadley, CMO, Heavy.com
Patrick Keane, Executive Vice President & Chief Marketing Officer, CBS Interactive
Rebecca Paoletti, Director, Video Strategy, Yahoo

In the past Interactive agencies lead the buying for online video but now working more with TV buyers. But its a lot of education  - rebecca: I tell them that if they can put 1% of their TV budget to work in online video they can drastically

Impediments,Challenges,Solutions - to bringing advertisers and agencies to these platforms:

Education - what is in this space and how will my content/brand be represented there?

Measurement - TV people are all CPM but interactive/online CPE is becoming more relevant (cost per engagement - time spent and quality of it not just impressions)

Scale

Understanding what works in a video rich environment - you have to think differently to engage in marketing in this space. Reminding buyers that this is a different experience and different mentality for end user  - you don't have complete share of voice you have a small player and complex context. Re purposing commercials isn't typically going to cut it.

Users will go where they can get the broadest range of content and best experience with it. We need much better navigation and discovery engines in order to really get going with video - it's just not there yet. Large portals get where they are because of the search - people go where they think they will find what they are looking for so untill search develops better its about perception.

In five years everything will be dramaticallly different in this space (all agree) Mobile will be the big thing, video search will be better, devices for getting content will all be linked changing how people find and use it in their lives. Generation that is coming of age in the next 5 years is already very different.

People buy TV for reach and until there is an easy way to replicate that reach they will still prefer to buy TV.

Any categories that have not been able to spend on TV that are a good opportunity for Online: Alcohol, Digital.

Nike - The Second Coming: liveblogging OMMA Global

Catharine P. Taylor, Mediapost's Social Media Insider
Speakers:
Riche Grantham, VP Invention, Sarkissian Mason
Patrick Sarkissian, President, Sarkissian Mason
Mahi De Silva, Co-Founder, Chairman and CEO, Frengo Corporation

I am attending this because it is a case study and it is SO rare at thes conferences to drill down into specifics and pragmatic aspects of getting social marketing campaigns done. Also I ma increasingly involved in developing the kinds of campaigns that agencies are often charged with so the agency take is always of interest.

Slide about the growth of mobile, SMS, social media in market - lots of growth.

What are the areas where Mobile technologies and Social Media intersect?

What are the disruptive changes that are occurring int he mobile ecosystem?

"Freemium" is the future - giving away services/content that was once 'premium' as a taste

iPhone/Android and open source

Part 1) campaign is a spot created by Wieden Kennedy

Part 2) Mashup tools and content made available

Part 3) Standard viral sharing tools for social networks but also allowed downloading so users can put them anywhere AND tool for sending to phones.

1.5 M users in 6 months - 6 min adv visit

Now we frengo is talking about Flirtable - not sure why yet. It let's you send little 'gifts' and look at profiles on a phone - it extends across  many social networks - Facebook, Bebo etc..Provides the same experience on any site on any network.

started to put advertising around this content - 1800flowers and then Love Guru movie "this is crazy but we signed up 40K people per hour to the Love Guru fan club when we first launched this"

created an Icanhascheezburger to go site for mobile.

Meetup.com - applying geotargeting to mobile from personal profile info online - can send users info about events, businesses near them that related to their interests. This is where mobile/social gets really useful.

How did you drive people to the site?

Promoted on Nike properties and media buy within sports enthusiast groups as 'get outtakes' from the commercial.

mobile is getting higher engagement numbers  - clickthrough rate on mobile banner is much greater than standard online banners. Ultimately this targeted engagement is what will convince people to pay more attention/money on it in the future. changing the way people look at mobile as a campaign media.

not all targets are 18-24 - what will it take to reach older demo with mobile campaigns?

behaviors are changing. Content and hardware becoming more tailored to different audiences.

Liveblogging at OMMA Global

I am attending some of the panels at OMMA Global conference today.  Right now sitting in the What is Content? Panel. A subject that is in fore for me as I work on social marketing at Showtime. I always look at anything we put out there as content or else it has no value. Any and all marketing and promotions should be considered content it's one of the positive effects of the flattening nature of the web. All information has equal value. Google changed that because it's efficiency lead to creating a hierarchy of  information that prioritized what indexes well in its search.  Ok, I could follow that  rambling train of thought all day but back to the panel...

WHAT IS CONTENT?

MODERATOR: Diane Mermigas, Editor-at-large, MediaPost's MediaDailyNews

SPEAKERS:
Jason Kilar, CEO, Hulu
Jeff Berman, President of Sales & Marketing, MySpace
Albert Cheng, Executive Vice President of Digital Media, ABC Television Group
Mark Goldman, Chief Operating Officer, Current Media
Douglas Scott, President, OgilvyEntertainment

The day of passive viewership is over.

Despite the absence of a unified cross platform metric - metrics my never develop for this - how are you addressing this? Is it more about setting up and meeting specific goals for each

Digital is always held to a higher standard because more can be measured. Thus

Hulu belives inletting users make decision for themselves, not in aggregate but each individual.

Breaking news - people like both short and longer form content online just depends on presentation and situation. Hulu is proving this by streaming full episodes.

Days of traditional media buying are numbered. It's about how all the parts work together to drive the sale.

These platforms are all looking at themselves as cross platform media distributors - good, don't get yourself stuck in an 'online video' corner.

It is about creating a singular experience across all platforms and media.

There will be standards but it will be continual innovation until we figure out what works... or since the pace of innovation in this area is SO great will it be possible to ever devlop a standard. When innovation is a driving principal behind a company (goal etc) where does standardization even fit??

It's not about creating standards it about continually finding something to meet needs and get audience attention.

Futures of Entertainment 2

Last week I attended the Futures of Entertainment conference presented by MIT's Convergence Culture Consortium. It was a great weekend, inspiring and engaging.

The most exciting part was getting to be around people who are experienced enough to be jaded, yet manage to still be excited about the possibilities for media in the future. The mix of industry professionals who are adept at academic discourse and academics who are interested in the media marketplace was really unique.

The entire conference included only 4 panels, each extending to about 3 hours. When I told Sam Ford,one of the organizers, how much I appreciated this, he said that the time frame is intended to make panelists run out of talking points and actually get into genuine extemporaneous dialog. It certainly allowed for much more in depth conversations that one would typically encounter at a panel of the same title elsewhere.

I finally had some time this weekend to take a look at my notes from the conference and I will be post highlights from them in the next few days, as a way to get this myself used to writing on this blog.