Oct
4
Seismic Ad Movements
Filed Under B2B, Blog, data analytics, internet, mobile content, news media, online advertising, Publishing, Search, social media, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
There have been gathering warnings all through the autumn. Now a realization is beginning to form, we can look back and see how it crystalized, and what it may mean. But the underlying message is clear: the power of advertising as a media business model is broken, and will never return with the same force. How do I know? Well, for a start, I heard Chuck Richards, Outsell’s B2B analyst, say that the B2B market would become overwhelmingly “pull” based: we are looking, in the view of the least alarmist commentator that I know, at a world where conventional display and banner advertising will disappear. I sat still for an hour after hearing this thinking of all the precursor events that I knew about and trying to put them in order.
For a start, digital advertising revenues, though trumpeted by anxious media owners, show no signs of returning to either pre-recession or pre-digital levels. Anywhere, not just B2B. So with print diminishing and digital ads becoming a lowly priced commodity, the influence of advertising of any sort on network-based business modes is in retreat. Indeed, the interesting marketplace in advertising suppressants tells an aligned story. Lets take AdTrap (http://www.getadtrap.com/) as a typical example. This is not even software to block advertising, but a hardware-based solution that stands between the server and the modem – and edits web pages. Notice its angle of approach: “a small price to pay to lose intrusive advertising and videos – and have web pages that load more quickly and easily” seems to paraphrase the message. Now keep looking and you will find that Yellow Page style advertising has almost gone, that print is discounting heavily to offset falling circulations. Only television seems secure…or does it? Programme making power seems to be moving from the traditional (cable) networks and franchise holders towards “made for download” TV. The new powers will soon be Netflix and its imitators, and we shall be talking about the Game of Thrones content creation model. Everything here speaks to sponsorship: nothing supports the intrusive intervention of “message breaks” filled with minutes of surplus to requirements video drizzle.
But surely the mighty advertising world will not take this sitting down? Well, I was ticked off recently for referring to WPP as an ad agency: I should have said “marketing and data analytics” company or some sort. Omnicom and Publicis are now engaged to be married: is this a merger of strengths or a way of disguising weakness? Certainly the elan of an industry which, in its 1950s manifestation was a billboard for the confidence and prosperity of a recovering post-war world, now looks fragile and faces real issues in this slow post-recession recovery. Creatives are still a high value commodity, but the world of PR and advertising built on campaign planning and tactical development and space booking can normally be performed by the workflow tools installed on the laptop of the lowliest marketing assistant working for the big brand owners And the brands are more likely to have the data required for higher level analytics – and to invest in it.
So brand management, like the rest of us, looks to lose cost and gain in productivity terms. And all the tools are there to do the job, though they do not present themselves, for obvious reasons, as ways of undermining their existing clients in advertising and PR. Companies like Gorkana and Cision have moved from their historic base in the news clipping services – a dull necessity for ad agencies who needed “voucher” as proof of ad publication and clippings as a oemonstration of launch and PR impact. These players have now become bedrock workflow tools that also enable the migration of PR and advertising back in house, with only the creative elements remaining to be subcontracted.
What then replaces push advertising? Part on the answer lies with social media, with its ability at once to allow brands to create word of mouth interest, and its hugely powerful position as the Recommendation Engine. As social networks get over “big” and return to niche, they will become much more powerful as a source of purchasing impetus. “We need to replace the fridge – who recently bought one…? Why are half of my friends on Apple and half on Samsung…?”. “Here’s a link to where we bought them…” And this works as well in B2B niche sector business and professional networks. This is where users learn to go to Capterra and other niche listing, recommendations and comparison sites. And here is where wholly new buying relationships are going to be forged.
When I began as a young publisher one of my first responsibilities was the Nelson Classics, wonderful mini-editions of classic novels in a small format that had flourished before the First World War under the editorial direction of John Buchan. Of course, by my day they had been swamped by Penguin and the age of the paperback. One thing that I noted was that while Penguins advertised other Penguins, my back pages were a messy swamp of advertisements for liver pills, Dr Collis Browne’s patented cures and other matter thought useful, no doubt, for constipated and otherwise afflicted readers. At one time, the book was thought to be a place for push advertising, and just as it has so certainly retreated from the book, e or otherwise, our children will be surprized when they reflect that it was once an expected feature of magazines, newspapers, networked media and mobile devices.
Sep
22
Goodbye Native Websites!
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, data protection, Education, eLearning, Financial services, healthcare, Industry Analysis, mobile content, privacy, Publishing, Search, semantic web, social media, STM, Uncategorized, Workflow | 3 Comments
It was the second afternoon of the last EASDP annual conference, last Friday in Amsterdam. The Big Business of the day was said to be over, in that at their General Council EASDP, representing Europe’s directory publishers, had voted to merge with EIDQ, Europe’s directory enquiries services. Sic transit the glory of the yellow page players. I was sad – EASDP in its heyday ran some of the most entertaining meetings in Europe. I was happy, since I had lost a night’s sleep en route to Amsterdam and was approaching going home time. And then he threw this thunderbolt across the stage and rocked us all back in our seats, “You may never visit a native website again!”
The line had added impact in that it came from a former CEO of Experian’s B2B services, Phil Cotter. He was speaking for BIIA and his own consulting interests, and addressing the issues posed by predictive analytics. And he was skilfully piling up the arguments around a machine-to-machine future, the role of the intelligence in the network, the ability to track and map our activities as predicted by the past activities of ourselves and others like us. And suddenly, all of the chat about behavioural targeting and the future of advertising on the web crumbled into dust for me. The website now becomes a totally different proposition. This is not the display table, advertising driven, designed to bring users to your goods and services. This is the storehouse of your advanced metadata and this the key to your discoverability. Mostly you will get discovered by machines, so you need to be very aware of how to tell them who you are and what you are about in language they can understand and use. As it happens I am moderating a session at the Frankfurt Book Fair (http://en.book-fair.com/fbf/programme/calendar_of_events/detail.aspx?PageRequestId=6ea4655a-3dd4-4209-872a-fcd3a6240b02&a1850834-d682-44a4-9b98-1ff33a3bcb5c=72b77c9a-c2af-4cca-a94f-268d1d3987ed) where some of the best brains in STM will address this issue: yet Phil makes me realize that this is not just an issue for the advance guards of science and technology publishing: it is about to crash, with frightening speed, on your shore as well.
Later in the session, as Phil was explaining the way in which the LAPD use predictive analysis to create patrol patterns for police cars, a hand shot up. “If patterns of crime exist so that you can say where the next lookalike crime will occur, after a few nights the cars will be entirely in the wrong places” Phil explained gently that this was why the analysis was run every day, and thereby gives me a second insight into what is happening. We are still thinking at our own speed about real world cycles of change. It does not matter to the machine that we are so slow to process: predictive analysis can be run repeatedly to catch nuanced change in activity if that activity is important enough to justify it. Then again, most of the apps that run predictive analysis are going to lodged, for consumers and for commercial users, on the advanced smartphones of the future. There the emphasis is likely to be upon rapid decision-making in an increasingly time-constrained society. Predictive analysis only needs to be “right enough” to allow a decision to be made.
And, of course, intelligent predictive analytics software is everywhere you look. SAP and SAS have history here: IBM and Oracle have serious offerings: TIBCO and Orange have activity here. But have a look at WEKA from Waikato in New Zealand (http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~ml/weka) for some fascinating stuff on machine learning, and kick the tyres of specialist players like Foresee (www.foresee.com) or Absolutdata.com. This is a fast-changing world and the time between research lab and application grows ever shorter. Meanwhile I heard a good interview on the radio last week. An independent television producer was complaining that the advertising muscle of major agencies like WPP was being used to compel the co-financing of the TV they wanted – no shared deal equals no advertising was the implication. And we were expected to disapprove of the power of advertising being used in this way. But what if the agencies simply have a realistic view of the future of advertising and want their business to migrate to different places in the value chain. They will discover in time that content production is not the route to riches, but maybe they have already worked out that advertising is unlikely to go to the networks without being wholly changed – by predictive analysis, by recommendation engines, by community buying and countless other network driven expedients. Once again, the power migrates in the network to the user.
Then Laurie Kaye, now at Shoosmiths as their lead man in media legal pyrotechnics, came on stage and told us about the “right to be forgotten”. Not a good day for advertising and lead generation – in a conference dedicated to advertising-based directories and marketing services. The world is moving too fast to allow for the realtime re-calibration of the trade associations.
« go back — keep looking »