Russell Davies

monetise

Here's the Campaign doodah from Feb 9th. And here's the text:

Remember the first internet bubble? Boo.com, Lastminute.com, all that? Every other word was 'monetise' and though not everyone had a business plan it seemed that everyone needed one. Doesn't that seem a long time ago now? We're now in a period of similar excitement but you don't hear the monetise word half as much, and when you do it's normally from someone who doesn't 'get it'. Right now, not as many digital media brands are that worried about monetisation, which confuses the whole media landscape, because the importance of money used to be one thing buyers and sellers of eyeballs could agree on.

Take craigslist for example. It's an easy to use, mostly free classified and listings service which has taken the States by storm and is terrifying every classified newspaper business in the world. Their CEO baffled Wall Street in December by saying he had no real interest in finding ways to further monetise the site. The analysts were perplexed because craigslist is the 7th most visited site on the web and the advertising revenue from that could be enormous. But the craigslist guys were insistent that they were making enough money to make a living and that adding advertising would detract from the service. So they weren't going to do it. But perhaps the most significant factor in all this is the fact craigslist only has 22 employees. (The next smallest company in the web's top ten is Yahoo! with 10,000 employees.) It has become possible to achieve global scale and relevance without becoming a huge business. That means less need to worry about monetisation and more freedom to ignore the lure of Madison Avenue.

This is happening on a smaller scale all over the digital world. Ideas that would have taken millions of VC dollars a few years ago are being built by a couple of kids in a garage without any real thought of a business model. And only a tiny handful of bloggers make any kind of income out of their blogs. That's not why they do it. But they're still attracting large numbers of eyeballs away from mainstream media, and those eyeballs aren't converted into revenue.

When you talk to media owners this is the thing that frustrates them the most; they can't compete with these people because there's no business model to co-opt. MegaMediaCorp can't simply set up a bunch of competitive blogs and regain that income because the money wasn't there to begin with. It's very hard to compete with people who work for free, but that's something they're going to have to learn to do.

bad ad science

Here's the Campaign thing from a couple of weeks back. And here's the original text:

When I'm not composing these glistening pearls for Campaign I spend quite a lot of time writing a blog called eggbaconchipsandbeans. It's about fried food and cafes, as you might imagine. It's quite popular in the fried food and cafes world, so occasionally someone from a related brand gets in touch to try and sponsor the site or involve me in some ingenious promotion. The last people to do said they were attempting to 'save the Great British Cafe' (though it wasn't long after that they closed their Great British factory). They were making their campaign journalist-friendly with a survey they wanted me to endorse which demonstrated the British cafe was on its last legs. But they hadn't counted on me being a pedantic planner so were a little taken aback when I asked about the research methodology; which was the usual faux science PR rubbish. All they'd done was ask a bunch of people whether they themselves thought the Great British Cafe was under threat; rather like asking the Family Fortunes survey the speed of light and basing your space programme on the most popular answer. They then trotted this nonsense out to the papers and got the required editorial flurry. I was especially annoyed that The Guardian fell for it, as their own Ben Goldacre does such good work unpicking this stuff  in his Bad Science column.

We marketing and advertising folk have always played fast and loose with science when trying to convince our customers of the merits of Product X. Vast Soho warehouses have been co-opted to house the computer graphics technicians who do the nonsensical science bits in the middle of ads. Huge battalions of lexicographers labour day and night to create convincing neologisms and circumlocutions like 'active liposomes' and 'challenges the signs of aging'. And don't get me started on that bloke who announces the saddest day of the year every year. We're partly to blame for the devaluation of science, the tendency to ignore it when it's not convenient, which give us excuses not to act on things like climate change.

We could get away with it once because not many people cared that much, and those that did couldn't really make much of an impact. That, of course, is all going to have to change. Because one inevitable consequence of an empowered and connected cyber-citizenry is they're going to ask awkward questions on those corporate blogs we're all busily building. They're going to demand detail on the science behind the assertions, the facts behind the flummery and then we'll all need to have proper answers, not surveys and opinions.

questions for howies?

Here's a message from Caroline at Campaign:

"Campaign’s running its Yahoo! Big Ideas Chair interviews again this year and the first one’s with Dave Hieatt. He and his partner Claire quit their overpaid jobs and sold their house to set up Howies. I'd like to hear if you have any questions to throw at Dave. Ethical, media, business...it’s all valid. The interview’s on February 1 so please make it fast. Big thanks."

If you've got questions for Caroline to throw at Dave please stick them in the comments below. thanks.

consumer edited content

Here's last week's Campaign piece. (If you want to spam me, please note that they've got my email address wrong.) And here's the original text:

For the past couple of years it's been impossible to open a trade journal without being flooded with leaflets for conferences promising to reveal the secrets of Consumer Generated Content. How to harness it strategically, manage it effectively or simply worry about it in a slightly more informed manner. CGC promises to fall somewhere between the holy grail and manna from heaven in the desirability stakes. The punters make their own ads so they're bound to like them. And they cost nothing. And obviously they're going to be consumer-relevant, the consumers made them. How can it all go wrong? Just one thing. Not many consumers are going to be bothered to make content for you. There are very few doing it now, when it's new and novel, so when every brand in every supermarket features an ad-making competition the chances of any one brand getting anything decent are very, very slim. And, speaking as someone who's created the odd bit of digital content, I'm very clear why I'm doing it, for myself, my family and my friends, not for any brands. There are occasions when a brand might inspire me to do something, or might host something I've done, but it's not that often.

Consumer Edited Content is a better description of what most regular folk usefully do online; they point at the good stuff. They take the streams of garbage out there, from real people or mainstream media, and they help us sieve through it for the nuggets. They do it with tags, blogs or email or simply by allowing their own behaviour to be logged and shared through services like last.fm. And most interestingly, we're not far from seeing that phenomenon impact the way we watch TV. The Big Brother racism imbroglio was a form of Consumer Edited Content, it was the complaints and outrage of viewers (with digitally enhanced complaining technology like email and blogging) which led the charge, not the professional opinionaters. But if you thought that storm was quick, global and loud, wait until Joost has 10 million users. Joost.com is a new online/TV hybrid thingy with all sorts of clever technology under the hood, that adds social and community technologies to TV/video viewing, allowing the viewers to talk about programmes, point at the good ones and the bad ones and create their own channels, all in the same space. Channel 4 were palpably rubbish at reacting to the mediastorm they created with regular telly but will you be any better when your ad or your content gets talked about and edited out in a live, distributed context like Joost?

blurry future

Yesterday's Campaign thing. About Blag and the blurry future. Click on it and it should get big enough to read.

UPDATE: Here's the original text. I've just realised they took out my DANGER, ADVERTORIAL, DO NOT READ gag, which I thought was quite good. Oh well, they're the boss.

I have a seen the future and it’s a bit blurry. Have you ever read Blag magazine? You should, it’s rather splendid. A stylish combination of music, fashion, photography and interviews. You could imagine it shelved between i-D and Wallpaper. It’s a quarterly, produced by twin sisters, Sally and Sarah Edwards, who do almost everything in the magazine themselves. But the thought-provoking thing about it is that they don’t carry any ads. No regular advertising at all.

It throws you when you first open the magazine, the lack of ads dislocates the expected grammar of magazine reading, freeing you from flicking past the first ten spreads. It’s like watching an American TV programme on the BBC, you fade out for an ad break and then immediately fade back in. It’s odd but rather pleasant, making you realise how much the presence of advertising has coloured our expectations of media. An ad-free magazine feels as startling as a novel with the occasional colour spread.

But Blag isn’t brand-free and the way they integrate brands gives us some hints about the future where advertorials, branded content, branded utility and everything else gets messily blurred together. It’s a future that would horrify the massed bastions of old media editorial, especially those American news organisations that are always bleating about sacred barrier between advertising and editorial. The Blag team don’t worry about that, they’ll create editorial for you, weaving the brand into the magazine in a way that goes far beyond the typically lame advertorial. (And which never carries that big banner saying ADVERTISING which I always think may as well be preceded by DANGER and followed by DO NOT READ).

Of course us old school stalwarts will throw up our liver-spotted hands at this point and wail about the separation of church and state, lamenting the confusion that could befall the innocent reader on finding advertising not clearly labelled as such. But talking to the Blag folk the other week I realised this approach just isn’t going to survive contact with a newer generation and a new communications world. They see this editorial/advertising distinction as completely ridiculous; they preserve the integrity of their magazine by managing the branded-content with the same verve and vision as the rest of the thing. They select brands that make sense for the magazine and create brand content that’ll work for their readership; making for a much more interesting overall product and never risking the kind of car-crash of editorial and advertising you get in so many magazines. As brands become content providers, as interruption gets less effective and as media-owners get more desperate this is a blurry line we’re all going to have to confront. 

predictions

Last week's Campaign thing. Click on it and it should expand enough to read. Hopefully.

UPDATE: And here's the original I sent them. Fairly similar I think.

It’s my first piece of 2007 so EC columnist regulations dictate I have to write a list of portentous-sounding but ill-conceived predictions. None of which I will ever re-examine or re-consider. So here goes:

1. Urban Spam. 2007 will be the tipping point year for the re-balancing between society at large and the steady encroachment of interruptive marketing. Ad avoidance will move from the personal sphere and into the public one, whether it’s junk food ad bans in Britain or the outlawing of ‘visual pollution’ in Sao Paulo, we’ll have to get used to public authorities setting new limits on how and where brands get to operate. We must accept that we’ve brought this on ourselves through decades of crass behaviour and learn how to be more responsible corporate citizens.

2. Line? What Line? This’ll be the year when channel neutral communications agencies start to get born. Though that’s probably not the right jargon. I mean that we’ll start to see the creation of coherent, effective businesses that are both above and below the line, traditional and digital, upstream and downstream, integrated and specialist. That’s not any clearer is it? I guess I mean we’ll finally see the core team running an agency being made up of representatives of all the modern communications disciplines, without the old hierarchies or the new bitterness. What will the jargon be for that? Don’t know. Let’s make 2007 the year we at least work that out.

3. Back To The Old School. TV advertising will make a huge comeback as people grow out of the need to be reflexively media neutral (and everyone spots how cheap it is). Similarly we’ll see a return of slogans, jingles and animated icons as a new generation of creatives discovers their power and doesn’t feel the need to do something deliberately obtuse and contrary in order to win awards

4. Good Brand. Bad Brand. Most significantly, it’s clear from everything you read and everyone you talk to that this is the moment when green and ethical issues will move to the fore for brands. CSR will stop being an under-funded department and start being an area your customers really care about and a potential differentiator, for good or bad, for your business. The reality of global-warming is permeating the public consciousness and will impact buying decisions, combined with relative affluence and an oversupply of brands with very few meaningful distinctions between them people are bound to start making choices based on perceived ethical credentials.

5. Maybe Rename It Blogsnight? The Prime Ministerial reshuffle will kick off a long general-election phoney war conducted via blogs and online video. Jeremy Paxman will have to get used to saying ‘blogger’ without sneering.

campaign stuff

Just FYI, these are most of the pieces I've done for Campaign this year. I don't seem to have the rest of them. Hopefully if you click on them, they'll get big enough for you to read. (You'll see I've given up scanning the horrifying picture that accompanies them.)

youtubification of politics

I was sitting last night watching the US election results coming in and it occurs to me that there's maybe something to write about for my next Campaign piece about the youtubufucation of advertising - as seen in political advertising.

Most of the ads I've seen in the last 10 days are absolutely, appallingly, awful. LIke they always are. Insulting to the intelligence,  ill-conceived and badly made. But they're not quite as bad as they used to be. And they're bad in a slightly different way than they used to be. There are more ads trying to be funny, more ads based on parodies of pop culture themes and more ads trying, vaguely, to be 'conceptual'.

And some of this must be down to political campaigns spotting the communications potential of YouTube  (and all the other video sites). They realise that if they're funny or interesting in some way they might get some kind of viral effect and get infront of more voters. (And, of course, they might get news coverage if they get popular enough).

Of course this all raises interesting possibilities for the next election in the UK but I think it also points at a future for marketing generally. As user-driven media ( as opposed to user-created media) picks up then the quality of branded creative work is bound to slowly increase. Surely.

Or am I missing something?

And I'm sure this is something that other people, smarter, more informed people, than me have written about but I can't find it. Partly because I never read political blogs. (Apart from Steve's) Does anyone know of anything anyone's written about this?

PS - I'm starting to find it really hard to let a post go up without a visual. So I'm now collecting generic images which will fit with anything. I've got a few that say 'post', what I need now is for people to start writing the word 'blog' or 'opinion' or 'waffle' on the streets.

 

life's a pitch

So I'm thinking I might start with this for my Campaign piece for next week. It's Jon Steel's new book. And since his last book was the best one you can read about planning, and he's a nice and smart man, I have to assume this one'll be brilliant too.

But I can't do a book review (because I haven't read it) so I was going to use it as a starting point to talk about the new business pitch. It seems to me that, as we watch the slow decline of Big Advertising, one of the skills that should be preserved and transferred out of the mess and into the new world is British agencies skill at pitching. I really suspect that no other business culture is as good at pitching. The over-supply of businesses, the frequency of account moves and the high stakes involved have created this tiny evolutionary hothouse where pitching's become this fine, refined art. And it explains a lot of why British planning is like it is, the Theatre Of Insight being a key new business strategy for so many years. That's why London won the Olympics, because we're better at pitching than the French, not necessarily because we'll stage a better Olympics.

Anyway, that's where I thought I'd approach it from. Any thoughts?

campaign

I started writing a column for Campaign last week. (First stab is above, if you have a Brand Republic account you can find it here.) I haven’t done something this nerve-wracking for a long time. You’d think I’d be blasé about writing stuff with all the blogging I do, they only need about 440 words a week, but it’s actually rather stressful. (You'll also notice that I chickened out of anything too original for the first one, rewriting some of the stuff from the Big Thinking conference. But I'm hoping to be more original from now on.)

It’s partly that there’s an actual immovable deadline, I can’t just stick up a closed notice. Or a picture of a tree. It’s partly that I’ve been reading Campaign for 20 years and find it slightly intimidating. And it’s partly that (in my own head) you lot are pleasant blog-folk willing everyone to do well and tolerant of mistakes and the readers of Campaign are vicious industry-insiders who can’t wait to pounce on any slip or dumb idea.

I know that’s ridiculous. And that more people probably read this than read Campaign and that there’s probably quite a lot of overlap between the two, but still, that’s how I feel. (Another difference is that if I’d been writing this for Campaign I might have felt obliged to go back and edit out one of those probablys). I should also say how excited I am to be doing it. One of the reasons I left Nike was to do more writing for money and it’s rather thrilling that I’ve got some writing work this quickly.

But writing these things is also teaching me how much harder writing for print is than writing for a blog. For me, anyway.

Firstly, you can’t just link to examples. If I want to mention some esoteric new thing I have to explain it, I can’t just point to it. And there’s the same problem with credit. Quite a lot of the thoughts in the first piece came from a chat with Richard. Linking to him is easy. Explaining all that (and who he is etc which you’d have to do in a print piece) eats up too many of my 440 words.

Secondly, it’s so slow. Since I was on holiday last week I sent them two pieces at once. The one for next week is about YouTube and mentions Coke and Mentos in passing. Then today I read about the new eepybird thing, which will be out on Monday. Which instantly had me panicking that maybe I should change what I’d written, though looking at it again, I think it’s fine. But, that’s the problem; print means you can’t just bounce off events, you need to think about bigger things, ideas that might last longer than a week.

Campaign have also been very accommodating about me wanting to blog about what I’m writing, I was very keen to do that, because I find sharing work on here incredibly useful, so the plan is this:

Campaign comes out on a Thursday. My deadline is the Friday before, so I plan to put a rough version of what I’m going to write about up on here on the Monday or Tuesday before that. I’m not sure yet what ‘rough version’ will mean, it might be just some early ideas, or a mind map, or a bundle of stuff that seems related. If anyone wants to comment on that I’d be hugely grateful. I’ll put the finished pieces up on here after they’ve come out, as jpgs and text, so they’re searchable. If people want to comment on the finished version that’d be excellent too. And I’ve created a Campaign category so you’ll be able to find all the pieces at once.

(Of course I say ‘all the pieces’ it keeps occurring to me that I might suck at this and my career as a Campaign columnist will only stretch to two  weeks. Ah well. We’ll see.)