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I think I’m a bit hungry… Thursday, February 26th, 2009

An entry in this week’s Online Video Insider blog highlights a tasty new trend: online video snacking; or as Dave Jackson writes, “more people, watching more videos, more often.”

A recent ComScore report on the topic found that in November 2008:

  • 146 million people, or 77% of the U.S. Internet audience, viewed online video;
  • Those viewers watched 34% more online videos than they did last year;
  • The average online viewer watched 273 minutes of video (more than six hours), up more than 40% vs. the previous year;
  • The average duration of online video is only 3.1 minutes per video; and
  • The audience viewed 87 videos per month on average, 18 more videos per month than last year.

    • The blog post highlights that the average duration of online video was the only metric that remained consistent compared to ComScore’s 2007 survey, up only 18 seconds per video - despite the fact that long-form sites such as Hulu (which runs mainly TV episodes) did not exist in 2007. To quote: “Americans still have relatively short attention spans when it comes to their online viewing experience.”

    Gender differences are interesting:

  • Women watch 41% more online videos than they did last year.
  • They now watch 79 videos per month on average, up 33%.
  • They spend 227 minutes watching online video, up 46%.
  • The average video length for women is 2.9 minutes, vs. 3.4 for men.

    • The conclusion? “Video snacking is a real trend because online video meets a content need for viewers and is easily accessible to those viewers throughout their day. Marketers and agencies, particularly those that are trying to reach women, would be well served to look for ways to build on this trend to help achieve their goals.”


    What your customers want from the web Wednesday, February 18th, 2009

    Looking back at past writings, I came across this one I originally wrote more than 10 years ago. Surprisingly, it still has currency today. Pleasantly surprised because many of the insights (such as the emphasis on interaction and community) have stood the test of time; not so pleasantly surprised because of some of the things that still haven’t changed, such as the continued use of the term “user” to describe web consumers - can’t we come up with something that has more humanity? So here it is:

    The World Wide Web takes channel surfing to heights only imagined by the most hardened remote control jockey. If your site is boring, of no use, or takes more than a moment to download, people will click away from your page faster than Homer Simpson can scarf down a doughnut. But if you can deliver what your customers want and expect from your Web site, you’ll have a very useful tool for your marketing armoury.

    Working out what consumers expect on a Web site is still more of an art than a science. As Fox Television and QVC home shopping executive Barry Diller says, “There are no mavens to be found and no research worth its salt. There are no guideposts, no divining rods to tell you what to do. It’s only with patience that you can develop a fluency in a new medium.”

    The online environment is young enough that it’s still being used as an extension of old media. It’s like the early days of television, when it was just radio with pictures. Television producers simply stuck a camera in front of the newsreader, radio serial performers or an orchestra (In fact, the Microsoft Network’s first foray into online news in Australia was exactly that - downloaded video of news editor Jason Romney reading out news headlines on a Web page).

    It was only when people like the legendary newsman Edward R. Murrow started taking the camera out of the studio and into the street that television evolved into a medium distinct from radio.

    Or to use a non-media analogy, the Internet is still a horseless carriage and not yet an automobile. Interactive new media are largely viewed as incremental improvements to traditional media, when in fact they represent entirely new ways of looking at the world. They are capable of doing things that have never been done before.

    The online world is still looking for its Edward R. Murrows. The successful pioneers will be the ones who listen carefully to their users and give them useful interactions that they can’t get in any other medium. (I use the word “user” reservedly, as an inadequate term waiting for the right term to evolve. They’re not readers, or listeners, or viewers - they’re all those things. So for now the word user is a term favoured by the IT industry until we come up with something better.)

    So how do you work it out? Here’s the current thinking on what consumers want and don’t want from a Web site, based on what’s working on the Web and what’s not. Some of it is simple logic, while with others you need to turn your head slightly and look at the world from another angle.

    They expect a personalised experience. The ability to serve up customised information has been a big selling point of the Web, and people have been listening. It’s now expected that a Web site will be littered with opportunities to shape their experience, by selecting types of information to be served up, whether to have sound on or off, etc. Personalisation can include building an analytic ability into a site, such as the database capability of commerce sites such as Amazon, which serves up lists of other books in genres in which you’ve performed searches. The greatest Web sites provide on-on-one specific, valuable information to one person.

    They expect it to be interactive. If you don’t give visitors the opportunity to contribute to a discussion, play a game or at least send you an email, you might as well have just printed a brochure.

    They expect to connect with others. Bulletin boards, discussion groups, chat rooms, mailing lists - there are plenty of ways to include features which enable people to share ideas with other people through your site.

    They expect a response - now. A Web site is a prime opportunity for service-oriented companies to offer full-spectrum customer service. However, you need to ensure that your response, even if it’s an automatic email acknowledging their request, is rapid.

    They expect it to be easy to find what they want. People are looking to the Web for information that is sorted and organised in a useful way, though not necessarily a conventional way.

    They expect depth of information (but not breadth). It’s much more useful to offer comprehensive information on a limited range of topics on your Web site than a little general information on a wide variety of subjects. Since a Web site has no limit to the pages it can carry, it offers an opportunity for hyper-focus not available to other media. The Web is a place where people can find information they can’t find anywhere else.

    They expect to use the Internet for research. The 1997 Price Waterhouse Consumer Technology survey found that Web users spent 43% of their time accessing the Internet for research.

    They expect compelling content - laced with entertainment. Consumers are drawn to the Web by content - content that is presented in a way that makes it easy to find, use and understand. It is becoming clear that content without usefulness, fun and interactivity is not going to keep people coming back for more. The information must be dynamic and instantaneous. Compelling and engaging content will always be more powerful than showing off technology. If you can combine enough technology to enhance the experience of studying your content, you’ll hold a user’s attention long enough to get your message across.

    They expect security and privacy. Users need to be told - and shown - that the reports about lack of credit card security, online stalkers and spammers littering the Internet are just that - reports.

    They expect to be able to buy things, safely and easily. Despite the general public’s fear on security issues, current and potential Internet users agree that there are a lot of items and services they would be prepared to buy online, once their concerns about security are addressed.

    They expect to be given a reason to return. Most Internet users only visit five sites with regularity -the rest are visited only infrequently or as a one-time link from another site. If your site is not going to be on your customers’ top five list, then you’ll need to employ devices such as email newsletters to keep your site top of mind and remind them why it’s worth coming back to your site.

    They expect value for the time and money they have invested. True to its anarchic origins, in the present online culture, there’s very little on the Internet that people feel is worth paying for. They’re already paying for online access, time spent visiting your site is an opportunity cost, and so much information is freely available. Therefore, think very carefully before trying to charge users for information.

    Having said that, consumers today are well versed in the concept of give and take - you give me something of value and I’ll provide you with something in return. The keys to long-term customer satisfaction are to provide each individual with truly useful information, presented in an appropriate context. Information that enables an individual to gain greater enjoyment or productivity from their home- or work-life will be valued, and you can command a price for it. The critical difference between useful and useless information is that you have made an effort to understand the needs and interests of your customers.

    They don’t want to be treated like idiots. Most Internet users can tell the difference between objective, non-commercial information and “sponsored” information. Don’t insult them by dressing up corporate data as objective fact. Admit your bias up front and focus on giving them something useful. They’ll remember you fondly for that.

    They don’t want to wait. This is the strongest reason for not loading your pages up with big graphics and animations. Make sure your design is economical and keep in mind that many users will not be using the fastest computers and modems.

    If you focus on giving your customers what they expect and want from a Web site, you’ll be on the way to viewing the Web as an automobile instead of a horseless carriage.


    Make ‘em laugh Monday, February 9th, 2009

    Jim Nichols at iMedia Connection has reviewed successful viral campaigns, and concluded that the biggest common denominator was the clever use of humour. Take a look at his review of 14 of the funniest, most effective campaigns (warning, political correctness alert).

    They include a pint-sized Gordon Ramsay-in-training, a graphic depiction of the effectiveness of condoms, a scatological ditty about toilet paper and Australia’s own ‘Flashbeer’ campaign for Carlton.

    Nichols writes: “Humor is hard to do, but perhaps even harder is crafting funny programs and messages that deliver real brand benefits. As we all know, assessing the impact of any creative on brand strength is pretty squishy science. But we can identify creative programs that drove buzz and virality online, and through this identification process attempt to tease out some core principles of brand beneficial humor.”


    Search remains strong in a struggling Australian economy Thursday, February 5th, 2009

    When Australians were trying to decide how to spend the Federal Government’s Christmas economic stimulus, it’s clear that their first stop was online.

    Google search enquiries in Australia during the Christmas and new year period grew by more than 50% in some categories when compared to the same period in 2007/08, B&T has reported.

    Searches for banks and financial institutions rose by a massive 74% from November 2007 to November 2008 and credit card searches achieved a 24% spike in December 2008 from the same period in 2007.

    Google recorded growth of 36% in searches overall for shopping and Christmas-related categories in December compared to the same period in 2007 year, with food and drink searches growing by 48 per cent. Searches for apparel were also up by 46% on last year, followed by photo and video equipment searches (42%), mass merchants and department stores (41%) and computers and electronics (34%).

    Real estate-related searches rose by 41% in December, while travel-related searches were up by more than 36% and automotive “deals” achieved 24% growth over 2007.

    Google Australia general manager Karim Temsamani told B&T that brands need to be wary about not having an online presence. “The worst thing for a brand is to be talked about from a word of mouth perspective or to have an ad on TV or other media, and then for the consumer to go online to find that product and it’s not there.”

    Google also revealed that search volumes for January are up 20% on last year.


    Adults dominating social networks Wednesday, January 28th, 2009

    The share of adult internet users who have a profile on an online social network site has more than quadrupled in the past four years - from 8% in 2005 to 35% now, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project’s December 2008 tracking survey.

    While media coverage and policy attention focus heavily on how children and young adults use social network sites, adults still make up the bulk of the users of these websites. Adults make up a larger portion of the US population than teens, which is why the 35% number represents a larger number of users than the 65% of online teens who also use online social networks.

    Online social network applications are mainly used for explaining and maintaining personal networks, and most adults, like teens, are using them to connect with people they already know.

    • 89% use their online profiles to keep up with friends
    • 57% use their profile to make plans with friends
    • 49% use them to make new friends
    • Other uses: organize with other people for an event, issue or cause; flirt with someone; promote themselves or their work; make new business contacts

    Full report here: http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Adult_social_networking_data_memo_FINAL.pdf


    Worst ads - some are real stinkers Wednesday, December 24th, 2008

    Here’s a link to a list of the worst TV ads of 2008, according to BNET: http://industry.bnet.com/advertising/1000452/bnets-worst-ads-of-2008/

    Warning: includes racism, vomiting and fart jokes!


    …and this is the year that will be Thursday, December 18th, 2008

    There are heaps of opinions about what will be hot and not next year. Here’s a quick guide to expert predictions for social media and e-marketing in 2009:

    • Peter Kim – 50 Social Media &Marketing Predictions for 2009: Fourteen different experts were asked to give their predictions. The list includes: “Obamamaniacs will spawn a new age of activism”, “Social media creates indigestion”, “B2B figures it out”, and “Your ad agency will be disintermediated – by a media company.” My favourite quote from the pundits: “Suddenly, being Facebook friends with your Mom will seem less strange than following 4,000 strangers on Twitter.”
    • Investment bank GP BullHound, cited by NetImperative predicts that: “The mobile industry will see renewed interest and growth in 2009 following the success of the iPhone and developments such as the Gphone resulting in consumers taking ‘PC’ habits with them on the road.”
    • “Online fashion retailers are also likely to display unprecedented growth as consumers shift spending from the High Street to online.”
    • 2009 will be a tough year for digital publishers with many expected to drop out of the list having either been acquired or have felt pressure on advertising revenue.
    • From ClickZ comes the prediction of all predictions: “The coming year in advertising is predicted to be, if nothing else, unpredictable.”
    • From eMarketer: Online advertising growth will be 8.9% in 2009 – much stronger than traditional advertising, but at a rate halved compared to predictions earlier in the year.
    • From Frontiering Talk: Video streaming from mobiles - “Soccer mums through to corporate presentations will be beamed from mobiles directly to the internet”
    • Integrated campaign metrics - “The holy grail of marketing will get one step closer as technology starts to allow a more integrated metrics reporting of campaign media.”
    • “Attention Surplus Disorder” will be coined as a condition that affects a growing number of people.
    • “Opinion fraud” will become commonplace with companies paying for positive recommendations for their products and services.

    What are your predictions, serious or otherwise? Please let me know via the comments section, and good luck in 2009.


    Shirt-folding beats political history Thursday, December 11th, 2008

    Attended the Thoughtworks Quarterly Technology Briefing in Sydney yesterday, where the heads of News Digital Media (Sue Klose) and Fairfax Digital (Pippa Leary) outlined developments in online media in Australia, and picked up some interesting facts about Australian online media consumption:

    • There are two spikes in visits to online news sites - at the beginning of the workday, when people check the news headlines; and at lunchtime, when they eat lunch at their desk and go for more entertainment info and videos
    • 35,000 people watched the live stream of Barack Obama’s victory speech on Fairfax Digital. That same day, a video on the site about how to fold a shirt was viewed by 39,000 people
    • Fairfax is claiming 2 million unique user per month just to its business and finance content, with 25-30 average page impressions per user
    • Online video advertising is expected to reach US$2.9 billion in the US in 2009 - 13% of the online advertising total - but the figures for Australia are expected to be only a fraction of that

    Social media - the Australian list Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008

    Gotta love the power of social networks! After my post yesterday analysing a list of international social media marketing examples and wondering whether anyone had done something like this for Australian businesses, the compiler of the original list, Peter Kim, has worked his contacts to find one. Here it is: Steven Noble’s Australian Social Media Case Studies. Many thanks, Peter, and good on you, Steven, who is an analyst for Forrester. I will have a closer look and post more about this later, but wanted to get this link up ASAP.


    The social media list Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008

    Are you on the social media ‘rich list’ (apologies to Channel 7 and Andrew O’Keefe)? Probably not, because as with so many things like this, Peter Kim’s Social Media Marketing Examples list is by a North American, for a North American audience. (Kudos to Telstra and the Sydney Writers Centre as apparently the only Australian organisations on the list. If someone has done a list like this for Australia, please let me know and I’ll be happy to promote it.) In the meantime, a look at this list of 324 companies that ‘get’ social media is interesting and constructive. For example:

    • Consulting giant Accenture has nine corporate blogs, five podcast channels and its own social network
    • Adobe has a directory of nearly 200(!) blogs by its employees
    • There are at least 135 Facebook pages, groups or applications mentioned on the list
    • 86 of the companies on the list are using Twitter accounts, many of them with multiple accounts
    • The renowned medical centre The Mayo Clinic has a YouTube channel (prepare to be grossed out at gruesome videos from the operating theatre)
    • Even the Oscar Mayer Weinermobile has its own Twitter account (so you can say franks for the memories!)

    Not all the companies on the list are large multinationals - the message here (with a nod to Anthony Johnson, who brought this list to my attention) is that all types of companies need to start getting involved in social media, because that’s where their customers are hanging out. They’re already talking about you without your participation - or worse, they’re talking about your competitors instead of you and you need to get out there and mix it up.


    ‘Glimmer of hope’ for online ads in recession Monday, December 1st, 2008

    Everyone agrees advertising overall is tanking as a result of the ‘GFC’ (global financial crisis), but how online advertising will be affected is a matter of intense debate. The online industry, naturally, is bullish on the prospects for online ad spend growth, but what do the battered finance and political media think? The Economist entered the debate last week, saying that although online ad spending in the US fell by 27% during the dotcom recession, ”the web has changed a lot since 2002. Back then, gaudy display “banners” on web portals such as Yahoo! and MSN were the preferred technology. These still exist, but they now account for less than 20% of online ad spending.”

    As they pointed out, more than 50% of online ad spend now goes to search advertising, while in brand advertising, rich media ads are taking over from banners. Because these forms of advertising are easily tracked, spending on online advertising is now “much less speculative, so that it starts to be treated instead as a cost of sales. This is one reason why online advertising should suffer less than other sorts.”

    This still leaves the problem of how advertising spend is transferred from traditional advertising to online. As the Economist points out, “At the beginning of the year Jeff Zucker, the boss of NBC Universal, a big television and film company, told an audience of TV executives that their biggest challenge was to ensure ‘that we do not end up trading analogue dollars for digital pennies’. He meant that audiences were moving online faster than advertisers, thus leaving media companies short-changed. Now, near the end of the year, the situation looks even worse, as the recession threatens to turn even the analogue dollars into pennies.”

    The Economist points out that online traffic is moving towards sites where advertising has so far proved ineffective - such as user-generated content havens like YouTube and social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook - “and is therefore cheap. This, says Mary Meeker (an Internet analyst at Morgan Stanley), presents an opportunity for innovation and arbitrage by clever marketing managers as they cut their conventional ad budgets. It may also provide a glimmer of hope for the advertising industry as it enters recession.”


    Simon on DishyMix Monday, November 24th, 2008

    Hear Zazoo’s Business Guy Simon van Wyk interview CEO of Personal Life Media and Internet connector Susan Bratton on what she has learned from the Internet gurus she has interviewed for her DishyMix podcast series:  http://personallifemedia.com/podcasts/232-dishymix#ep72


    TV-online video migration continues apace Wednesday, November 19th, 2008

    The evidence is gathering that online video is cannibalizing television consumption and revenue.

    An IBM study that polled 2,800 people in six countries has revealed that more than three-quarters of people have viewed video online and nearly half do it regularly. Of those who have watched online video, 15% say that as a result they watch “slightly less” TV, while 36% said they watch “significantly less” TV.

    Paying homage to the history of commercial television, 70% of online video viewers prefer the ad-supported model over consumer-paid models. They specify, though, that they prefer watching a commercial before or after an uninterrupted online video, and they don’t like product placement.

    Almost 60% of the respondents said they were willing to provide to advertisers some personal information about themselves in exchange for something of value, such as access to high-quality music videos, store discounts or airline frequent-flyer points.

    “The industry must find appealing ways to monetize new content sources or risk a similar fate as that of the music industry where value shifted away from core players,” said Saul Berman, the study’s co-author.

    Meanwhile, eMarketer reports that while TV revenue growth is slowing, online video revenue growth is soaring - though the overall numbers suggest there is a fair amount of leakage in overall spend.

    eMarketer estimates there will be $284.8 billion in total US ad spending in 2008, and TV still garners 25% of those dollars. But in 2009 US TV advertising spending will decline 4.2% to $66.9 billion.

    “This precipitous drop reflects not only the poor economic conditions, but fundamental changes in the way television advertising is being bought and sold,” says Carol Krol, eMarketer senior analyst. “Although there will be inevitable stumbling as they find their footing, the broadcast networks are making bold and interesting choices in an effort to follow consumers online,” says Ms. Krol. “They are collaborating with competitors, hooking up with online partners and forging alliances that were unheard of just a few years ago.”

    Online video ad spending as a percent of TV ad spending is expected to nearly double over the next two years, however it will still only reach 1.7% in 2010 - and still less than 3.5% of overall online advertising spend.

    Krol points out that there is still “no clear winning online business model for broadcasters,” and that online advertising revenue growth is less than offline media decline. Which raises the question: where is that money going?


    Digital business model - but who profits? Monday, November 17th, 2008

    Vin Crosbie from ClickZ writes that media and digital publishers have been ignoring the obvious  business model for online publishing all these years - aggregating all content and allowing users to choose what they want to read/view. Think iGoogle, on a wider scale.

    Traditional publishers toyed around with this concept years ago, but as Crosbie points out they never picked it up and ran with it because it would mean collaborating with their competitors (I wrote about this a couple of weeks ago in a post that was inspired by another piece Crosbie wrote).  He calls it “not mass media, but individuated media on a mass scale.”

    I understand what he’s getting at, but, frustratingly, he doesn’t go into details about how people actually make money out of this approach. One reason traditional media companies didn’t go down this route is that they correctly realised that if they just shift their traditional advertising models to the web in a format that shares profits with all the players, none of the players is going to make anywhere near the same revenue as they used to. To me, that’s where the digital business model is still missing - what do you make money out of besides banner ads?


    Sacrificed on the altar of the market Thursday, November 13th, 2008

    Like a Molotov cocktail hurled into a crowd, Publishing 2.0 blogger Scott Karp has ignited the already heated debate about the future of journalism and publishing with his most recent post, entitled “The market and the internet don’t care if you make money”.

    He’s pinched the title from Seth Godin, the marketing pundit who is peddling his latest book Tribes, but Karp takes the idea and runs with it in a long screed about how the Internet has broken the newspaper industry’s business model, a topic about which plenty of people including myself have written about ad nauseum. But Karp offers a detailed and particularly articulate discussion of this issue, writing that “Nobody has the right to a business model - Ask not what the market can do for you, but what you can do for the market.”

    As usual with this sort of thing, the comments are as entertaining and thought-provoking as the blog post, and as a former journalist I can relate to the responses from people in the traditional media. The words of Thomas Jefferson, author of the American Declaration of Independence, still echo in my ears as one of the main reasons I got into the media business: “Given a choice between a government without newspapers and newspapers without government, I would not hesitate to choose the latter.” The media have an important role in informing society and keeping governments honest. But while Jefferson specifically mentioned newspapers, if he was here today I think he would understand and approve of the Internet and blogging. It is the same principle he was talking about back in the 18th century - free speech. Whether it’s Rupert Murdoch or Ariana Huffington or Joe Bloggs exercising that right doesn’t matter.

    At the end of the day, say what we will, the market doesn’t care about ‘quality’ journalism and comprehensive local news coverage. We collectively need to find a model that works in this new and changing environment. I agree with Karp that a future business model lies in the power of networks, not the power of monopolies.


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