Digital

Fame TV launches in UK

OK so this is the next step in the chain of user generated videos....or is it just a  reverse of You've Been Framed where people pay for their videos to be shown, instead of getting £250?

Here's the article from AdAge Digital:

User-Generated Video Gets Its Own TV Channel

Fame TV Launches in U.K., in Discussions to Expand to U.S.

By Beth Snyder Bulik

Published: November 13, 2006

YORK, Pa. (AdAge.com) -- Ready for a TV channel made up entirely of consumer-generated videos?

Revver.com involved
That's right, for 1.5 pounds -- or a little less than $3 -- video makers can upload their work with the guarantee that it will run on Fame TV on the BskyB satellite network in the U.K. and Ireland. And U.S. video site Revver.com, known for its discovery and promotion of the wildly popular Mentos and Diet Coke fountains-of-fizz video, is the station's first aggregate content provider.

John Hayes, head of development at Fame TV, said the channel is currently in discussions with U.S. networks to expand here.

Fame TV runs nine boxes on-screen at one time, each titled and given SMS codes so that viewers can vote for their favorites via cellphone.

"This is just the beginning [of user-generated videos appearing on TV]," said Steven Starr, CEO of Revver.com. "Being affiliated with Fame TV is great for our creator base. ... We ask them, 'Would you like us to distribute your content into a broadcast environment?' And the vast majority, almost 100%, says yes."

Paying creators
While individual users pay to upload their work directly to Fame TV, Revver's videos will be aggregated and reviewed by the channel, and only some will be chosen to run, at no cost to the creator. Revver will pay creators half of the SMS revenue their videos garner on Fame TV; that's a business model Revver has used in the online realm, where it pays creators a revenue share for each view or download.

John Hayes, head of development at Fame TV, said the channel is currently in discussions with U.S. networks to expand here. He also said while Fame TV would consider taking ads on the channel, it currently does not, instead relying on fees generated by users for revenue. Since launching today, the channel has logged 1,000 video uploads directly from U.K. users, he said.

Still, not everyone is convinced consumer-generated media has a bright future on TV. Mitch Oscar, exec-VP at Carat Digital, pointed to user-generated content such as the online Blair Witch Project and JibJab, both of which gained massive popularity but not longevity. "They're great one-night stands, but they ultimately become just great memories," he said.

Media is changing - The rise of social media, with Antony Mayfield

Antony Mayfield is a specialist in Social Media and currently works for Spannerworks who are the people who published the best guide to understanding the basics of social media and all of this web business - download it and read it - it doesn't get simpler or more concise:

Download What_is_Social_Media.pdf

He is also the author of Open which is a great blog and the best place to go to read up on what's happening in the web and read some decent and witty commentary on it. I spoke to him about social media and this is what he said:

THE RISE OF SOCIAL MEDIA

Coming from a PR background as I do, I can say that PR is all about changing the perceptions and behaviour of people. This is why I am now in social media, because social media is all about influencing people within a network.

Brands have to now understand that their brand sits within a network; all brands do. All brands want to increase their influence, but some don't move beyond this thought. The switched on brands will however come to the conclusion that by being the most useful brand in that network will influence people to think about and behave towards you in a postive way.

Together with this is the fact that actually search engines are not interested in what words you have written on your site - what they are interested in is how useful is your site to whoever has entered a particular search term. (See Search Engine Optimisation for more of this).

Being useful to your network all stems from understanding how your brand fits in online, and being realistic about it. (A great example of a corporate website that is truly useful to its users is www.edelman.com - Steve)

The fundamental point is that media is changing and passive audiences no longer exist, particularly online - the most popular websites are those that let the users contribute content, re-edit others content and make connections with other people. If you look at www.alexa.com (tracks traffic to all websites worldwide) and look at the Top 20 Sites visited by people in the UK you can see that Flickr, Bebo, MySpace, Ebay, blogger.com, wikipedia and YouTube are all in there - Out of 20 sites, at least 7 fit the criteria of the users being able to contribute, edit and make connections with others through the sites.

This illustrates the trend that more and more people are learning how to create stuff online which represents a massive shift in the way people use information. Online is swallowing up books and TV - there are thousands of ways to use the internet and these will absorb other traditional channels.

I have expressed this view to many and it has met with much anger - but never has it met with an outright denial.

This may sound like a stark warning, but if you don't understand the online world and developments within social media, you should understand that your entire world and its foundations are changing, and changing incredibly quickly.

My advice for anyone who is looking to get into marketing and advertising now is to understand social media. The only way to truly understand it is to engage with it - See for yourself how quickly networks can form. Be part of those networks then start your own - don't be an external observer.

Be Useful - Brands Online

Just making an association with a content area really isn’t good enough. If you want to be remembered, regarded - or even just not ignored - be useful. It’s not a new trick but it’s something that brands can potentially do really well online.

This quote comes from the blog of Ryan Morrisson and Macmillan who are digital consultants. It is a really, really important point regarding how brands should be approaching the internet. Instead of just doing broadcast media online, they should concentrate on being as useful as possible to the people who access their site.

This relates back also to something called Search Engine Optimisation or SEO - basically trying to get your site further up the rankings on Google etc (but click the link to learn more). ONe of the ways to do this is to make your site more useful. According to Antony Mayfield:

Search engines want to know which site is most useful to whoever has entered in a search term

So that means linking to other places, putting explanations in, drawing in other ideas from other sites - basically helping people find out more, even if that involves them leaving your website for a time.

Mobile Marketing, with Nihal Mehta

Nihal Mehta is CEO and founder of Ipsh! a mobile marketing firm that began in the States and is now expanding into Europe. Founded 5 years ago, they were one of the first agencies to focus solely on marketing over mobile devices.

Their website is really good with lots of news stories - good source of research.

In August this year in the UK alone 3.6 billion texts messages were sent. Bearing this in mind I thought it might be interesting to ask Nihal some questions to understand a bit more about what mobile marketing is and what challenges he faces.

For more UK mobile stats and lots of information, check out Text It - Very useful.

Mobhappy is also a very good mobile marketing blog from the States.

Mobile Marketing, with Nihal Mehta

How would you define what ipsh does?

Ipsh is a mobile marketing agency that connects brands to consumers through mobile phones and mobile technology.

What is the range of the mobile marketing offering?

Our offering is no longer limited to the purely executional - we now provide stragey and creative for our clients. We are helping brands extend their presence over mobile devices.

When mobile marketing first appeared agencies that did it were limited to providing just the technology, but now we are advising clients about the how, where, when and why of their campaigns. It is a much more wholistic approach to things; the clients will now come to us and say, "We have this problem, how can we solve it?" as opposed to "We want you to do XYZ mobile campaign for us."

You can now reach over 2 billion handsets worldwide using SMS. That's a lot of people.

What is your role within ipsh?

As CEO I provide vision and strategic input alongside overseeing new business and internal management.

What motivated you to set ipsh up?

I started a website after college called phillytonight.com which informed people about events happening in the evening in Philadelphia. This expanded to 13 cities worldwide and then we began to offer information over SMS. Then the dotcom bubble burst and so we had to look to new ways to monetise our assets so we created ipsh.

The company was run out of my apartment in San Francisco for 3 years, in true start up style!

How did you make ipsh a success?

Our major strength has always been our complete focus on helping brands in their mobile strategy; we never diluted our offering.

The great thing is now that the market has finally arrived - it has caught up with all the predictions we have been making for the last 5 and a half years. We now have a tangible and viable market for our products and services and with our association with Omnicom there can be no doubts about our credibility.

What keeps you up at night?

How to make the business more profitable. How to increase the depth of our offering to clients - not just increasing the number of new services we can offer them but expanding the services we already offer.

What qualities do you admire in others?

Passion. People who are passionate about what they do, whatever that may be. If they are doing something they love, then they are already a success no matter how good they may actually be.

What frustrates you in others?

A lack of passion, living for the 9-5 routine. The kind of people who are hanging on to something they should have let go a long time ago, like a relationship. They have yet to end it out of sheer apathy.

What trends or changes in consumer behaviour have you noticed?

Consumers are now a lot more knowledgable - they know all about the possible uses of mobile phones. Also the demographic of people interacting with mobile technology is getting older - take ringtones. The demographic of people buying these is getting older and older.

What is the future for ipsh?

The future is to get brands to truly understand the mobile strategy and have dedicated account teams for certain brands as in a large traditional agency.

What is your favourite piece of communication at the moment?

Any piece of communication that can capture the brand message and the brand demographic perfectly is my idea of great communication. The best example I have of this at the moment is the apple vs pc ad running in the States at the moment.

Smile...

Great piece of viral for HIV and Aids charity Body and Soul

It's been up on the direct marketing page of this site because it has a text message response mechanism, which cos it's asking consumers to do something specific means it's a piece of direct marketing. But it's a cool piece of digital too. Let me know what you think - is it effective? Did you donate? Cheers, Steve

Yahoo profits slump

Yahoo has announced a 38% drop in profits. Read the full article here on Brand Republic. Basically  their display advertising (i.e. banner ads and overlays) revenues are taking a massive hit from the possibilities for advertising offered by sites like MySpace and YouTube.

But I didn't realise Flickr (photo sharing service) had over 20m users per month, and Yahoo Answers (although I have seen their ads on the tube) had 60m users monthly.

Yahoo also are going to get a slap for not buying Facebook quickly enough, especially when compared to Google's quick acquisition of YouTube.

As Yahoo, how do you compete against Google? What do you do to get back some of the of the market?

I think diversifying their offering through Flickr etc is the way, but Google is also doing that too.

Steve

Digital and the Future - Nigel Palmer

As this blog is all about giving people a better understanding of the marketing industry, I will be interviewing a series of people who are far more knowledgable than me about what they do and anything else that comes to mind.

This interview is with Nigel Palmer, Head of Account Management at Agency Republic (NIgel is no longer with Republic, he is Business Director at Saatchi and Saatchi. We talked about account management (which is one of the jobs most grads end up doing when they start), digital and what the future holds for digital agencies. Enjoy, and let me know whether you agree, or what you think.

So, Nigel, what is account management all about? What does it mean?

Account people, or 'suits' as they are affectionately known are the client's advocate within the agency and the agency's advocate with the client. You have to represent the client's best interests to the agency, and vice versa.

And what is the difference between above and below the line?

There is a common myth that there is a huge difference between above and below the line. IN reality the rule of communications is the same and it is:

Who is the communication targeted at?

What is it trying to achieve?

The analysis for a TV ad, a viral piece of digital, a mobile campaign, is all the same. The discipline is the same - only the technicalities and execution differ.

A better way to divide up the industry is between broadcast and relationship.

Broadcast is made up of TV, radio, print, outdoor - essentially passive media.

Relationship focused channels are less passive, and aimed at establishing meaningful relationships with consumers. Such channels are DM, digital, brand experience, sales promotion.

Now digital actually sits across both broadcast and relationship - there is out and out broadcast advertising online (banner ads) but also the internet is the most powerful relationship building tool in the world.

As someone who has worked in account management in digital advertising for a number of years, can you tell me your views on the digital advertising industry?

One of the most major questions is how long will digital be solely the preserve of specialists? Above the line agencies (i.e. traditional TV, print and outdoor ad agencies) are now starting to invest in digital.

The next generation of people growing up will not consider digital to be an extra channel, like TV, radio or mobile because it will all be the same thing, it will all be converged onto one platform and won't get split out as it does at the moment.

if you accept that in the near future TV, mobile and internet will be converged onto one platform, and if you also accept that agencies should mimic what is going on in society, you have to ask yourself when will agencies begin to mimic the convergence that is happening in the real world.

Arguably digital agencies are at the peak of their 'independent' period - we are approaching the cross roads - will digital agencies become the new behemoths, like the traditional ad agencies are now, or will they get swallowed by the traditional agencies?

It's a question of who will prosper - and some traditional agencies are appearing more and more like dinosaurs.

However the major advantage above the line agencies have is that they have very senior client relationships - in some cases with CEOs or Chairmen of the Board.

This means they are holding all the cards - if they can adapt, then they have the upper hand.

What are the most important online brands?

Google and Ebay, without a doubt.

Simple, yet incredibly effective and original (in the case of Ebay).

In Ebay's case it also demonstrates the power of word of mouth, and the amplifying effect the internet has on it. If you post something on a blog, there is the chance that thousands of people will see what you have written, and then act on that, or write something themselves.

TV advertising did not kick start Ebay - people did.

What is your favourite piece of communication currently?

The Volkswagen Golf GTI and Jetta site - (find it here) where you can build your own cars and in the case of the GTI see it being raced round a track with a the stunning Helga, and in the case of Jetta crash it into a bizarre range of stuff.

It is an example of true interaction and of the combination of extreme personalisation the web can provide and meaningful brand experience.

Digital is the only way something like this can be done.

Many more interviews to come. Nigel talks about grads here.

Cheers

Steve

Digital Creative

Hmmmm so what is good digital work? Every month MSN sponsor something called the creative showcase, which is a showcase of the best digital work for that month in the UK.

People from the industry judge it and the winner is praised many times over. Or at the very least get a mention in 'Campaign' magazine.

The site is here: Creative Showcase

So if you want to keep up with the latest digital work, check it out.

Cheers

Steve

How not to use a blog, by PayperPost

Although new to this blogging lark, even I know that the basic premise of it is honesty and transparency. There is no point lying, or writing things that are designed to covertly market something, or spread certain ideas. To this extent the blogosphere (rubbish word I know) is self selecting - the good ideas spread, the bad ones wither and die.

Brands that have tried to manipulate blogs by posting artifical comments about their products and services have been slapped down by bloggers in the past with often significant backlashes.

In spite of this, Payperpost have launched a service that pays bloggers to write positively about products or services on their blogs.

I read this on Antony Mayfield's Open blog, check out his post here.

I cannot say strongly enough what a dreadful, terrible, awful idea this is for any brand to try and covertly market themselves, their products or services in this way.

Backlash is putting it mildly. I'm not sure if you agree, but I think it's a terrible abuse of blogging and just shows that there are so many people out there who still have no idea what it is about.

Phew, rant over. Apologies.

Steve

Bluffers Guide to Social Media

Social Media is the catch all term for the new forms of interaction and communication that the internet now makes possible.

A chap called Antony Mayfield has written a basic guide explaining the key points about it, and it's great. Read it, you may know most of what's in it, you may not, but it really is something worth reading.

I wish this guide had been available when I was applying for jobs!

Find the guide at Spannerworks and lots of other articles, and if you want to read more of Antony's stuff, head over to his 'Open' blog here it's a really good one.

Let me know what you think about the article and any ideas that come out of reading it,

Cheers

Steve