Maximising product placement

Changes in UK broadcast legislation means product placements are set to make an increasing appearance* and is seen by many as a lifeline to the channels, for ITV alone it is expected to generate between £25 – £100 million in additional revenue.

Online and more specifically YouTube has not been victim(?) to such regulation, serving up content from other regions and continents with heavy product placement bias and funding.

marketing
The “Goggle” Box

The recent announcement of Google TV raises some interesting questions as to how they will approach monetisation. It has long been published the return on Google’s investment in YouTube has yet to be realised, with wild variations in the predicted revenue and running costs of the operation meaning 2010 is either going to finally be the turning point of profit, or yet another sunk cost for the search giant.

You tube today still relies on “served” advertisements as its main vehicle for revenue generation – but could this be smarter?

The opportunity to embed code in to the ad’s for user interaction has been available for some time, as yet this has not been deployed within YouTube. Will they (Google) adopt a similar advertising push model when they move into TV or adopt a smarter use of technology, data and measurement to engage users?

Selling out

Recently Lady Gaga’s “Telephone” video had 20 product features, not bad for a sub 4 minute music video. Now admittedly the speed at which these were presented would have made it tough to actually engage real time with each of the references, but one can’t help they could have been smarter in leveraging all of these mentions through some form of click on / click through overlay.

*BBC excluded

Measuring Buzz

Tylenol & Advil - brand perception and usage

Previously I touched on how using technology to measure buzz and online perceptions around products and services on the web while possible, still required a human element to interpret the resultant findings.

marketing

The reason, human traits such as sarcasm and sentiment could skew machine based analytics. An example being the word 'bad' could be interpreted by a human as actually being good, alternatively the context of an entire sentence could be reversed with the word not! at the end

marketing technology

An interesting development in this area from Crimson Hexagon could mean working out who is saying what about your brands could be a far simpler process than using technology to count words and frequency, with humans providing time and cost intensive interpretation.

marketing

At the heart of the technology is an algorithm which uses statistical analysis to gleen meaning and understanding from the blogs, websites and other social sites it trawls to produce these unbiased ( through optimization ) insights.

technology
In order to represent this data statistically they use a number of techniques, simplifying the data to create a ' bag of words ', weighting ( the second instance of the word love in a sentence does not provide as much information as the first ) and categorising this ' bag ' of information allowing it to be subsequently reported against, without human intervention.

Surrender or drown

The web grows bigger – fact

Content creation is estimated to be growing at around a billion pages per day

Google recently reached a milestone of a trillion pages while running there indexing tools.

Now of course there is a lot of content which is replicated and duplicated but even considering this it still leaves a staggering amount of new information, content and ‘stuff ‘ that makes our jobs even harder to find relevant and more importantly contextual content when we hit that search button.

Search tools fundamental purpose in life is to separate the wheat from the chaff, using smart technology to aid in the sorting process to deliver results which fulfil our criteria, but also deliver the all important contextual advertising that drives the revenue for search companies.

Companies such as Google admit that technology though can only go part of the way to solving the search problem, encouraging us to share information and store our browsing history to further improve these results but leading to privacy debates which continually rage.

So do we have to surrender our personal privacy so as not to drown in non relevant search results ?

A new entrant into the market place is Cuil, a start-up whose privacy policy very clearly states that they keep no logs, no history and do not use the information your computer sends in any way to identify you could be the life preserver many people are looking for.

Question is how then, with this expanding universe of data and information, can they provide today ( let alone the future ) a search tool that delivers relevancy?

Key features :

Context

“Cuil prefers to find all the pages with your keyword or phrase and then analyze the rest of the content on those pages. During this analysis we discover that your keywords have different meanings in different contexts. Once we’ve established the context of the pages, we’re in a much better position to help you in your search.”

Organisation

“We separate different ideas from each other so you can choose the one that interests you. We pick images to illustrate the idea behind each page to aid you in your choice. We include roll-over definitions and offer you ideas to refine your search.”

Search the web, not it’s users

“Because Cuil analyzes Web pages and not click-throughs, we don’t need to know your search history and habits” marketing technology

marketing technology

"Context", not content is king ( sorry Bill )

While marketing still debates the best method for delivering online advertising, Visible World is using technology to concentrate on the all important ‘ context question ‘.

Regardless of the method of delivery, making the content more personalised and relevant is key to maximising it’s effects.

Too often we still see video content being pushed in a manner which is reminiscent of TV broadcast – using assumption rather than data to help define and tailor the message.

Visible creates ‘ unique ‘ adverts using elements such as geography, information supplied by the user and time to ‘ pull ‘ various part of commercials together to create a targeted relevant video message.

Widgets

Widget's give the ability to push relevant content with a brand ' wrapper ' to users through a number of channels, either through desktop or embedding into websites such as Facebook and Blogger. marketing technology

The popularity of these is obvious, with San Diego based Yourmini's having already served a combination of marketing and user created widgets totalling over 700 million since start up

Read all about it...

geographical context

In the area of news context and locality are key elements. The popularity of local news and information which is relevant to users has resulted in newspapers adopting ‘ mashing up ‘ Google maps into the news stores. While adding context the interface, presentation and more importantly how users navigate is not optimal.markeing technology

MetaCarta takes feeds from the Associated Press and Reuters indexing and mapping the results against geographical locations. Stories are then categorised by geography or keyword and offers a great way to personalise and search for relevant news stories.

No Snipers at Terminal 5

anything but

From a security standpoint a good thing, from a marketing point of view - bad.

Terminal 5 in London has generated press and hype for many reasons over the past year, from a marketing standpoint being lauded as the next generation of user engagement - with over 300 digital screens positioned around the airport.

With all the technology at the hands of the marketer’s, the promise of a more targeted approach to outdoor advertising seemed to be here.

Unfortunately, it is anything but.

I appreciate that while we are still some way off actually identifying ' all ' passengers while in transit on a personal level, I feel a little disappointed that very little effort has been made at the very least addressing ' the group ' or where possible engaging on a one to one level.

During my entire visit not once was I prompted to download content to my mobile phone - despite many media screens running what can only be described as ' looped ' traditional TV spots – amazingly there was not one interactive screen.

T5 makes use of escalators and transit train to take you from the main part of the airport to the aircraft departures, only three static posters for a journey which takes over 15 minutes.

It went from an intense jumble of adverts all competing for attention in the main shopping areas to desert like barrenness in large portions of the airport.

marketing Desert marketing technology advertising interactiveBrand clutter

The one oasis in all of this was from a single brand – HSBC who continues to sponsor the jetties and pontoons which connect you to the aircraft – still all in traditional static format.

All of this considered it just goes to show the technology does not give an advantage if used ineffectively.

Look whose talking.....

Measurement is a good thing

As the saying goes, how can you manage something if you cannot measure it in the first place ?

Measuring the buzz around your brand can be a tough, with multiple media channels to manage it is no longer a simple case of scouring over the newspapers, performing customer surveys and watching the news to find out what people are saying about your brand.

Internet measurement has traditionally been a case of using web metrics such as page impressions to gauge a relative popularity, but this in most cases is showing you the past – you are seeing the effects rather than the cause.

Identifying , listening , understanding and engaging in these conversations is now part of the marketing mix – Blair Witch with its huge online following before the films release proves that this is a space where must all now operate and understand.

Here and Now – Are your key and emerging markets where you think they are ?

What you need is the now, the present, where and what are people talking about.

You are a chocolate sauce manufacturer and your sales are soaring without any significant change to your traditional marketing strategy – what is the cause of this ?

In the online space wisdom would point you to the cookery blogs to find out what people are saying, but are your key influencers actually there?

You may have a large pocket of ‘ chatter ‘ in one place but are these people the real brand advocates or those who have already been influenced and while valuable, may not be the right people you need to engage for further product launches.

You also find that upon investigation, this group of people are indeed fans of your product but not responsible for the increase in sales or interest on your site.

Yes directly engaging all customers in some form of market research will eventually glean this information – but how fast and nimble is this process?

Companies participation in forums and blogs is an essential part of managing this relationship – but without some help you may be missing advocates and influencers by focusing in the wrong place.

Lets also not forget this is a big task and not always top of the marketers priorities.

marketing technology

Help is at hand

Marketing technology tools are now coming to the market which in essence scour the internet for conversations about your brand and it’s competitors.

Buy using such technology companies are now able to build maps measuring and reporting these conversations looking for key phrases and associated words - for example the number of times I use your brand name and other favorable words, thus identifying me as an advocate ( or not ).

These maps can identify the flow of these conversations ( key ) along with the most active and influential by seeing the connections in and out of these people.

marketing technology

The horse has bolted.

By coupling this with my relationships or ‘ connections ‘ marketers are able to build visual relationships between users, groups and forums allowing them to engage and monitor these conversations.

Just one example of its application is the ability to be able to respond to possible PR disasters from this chatter.

Sony were able to issue a PR statement highlighting their care in response to ‘ chatter ‘ that was emerging on the net surrounding there paint adverts, moving themselves into a proactive rather than a reactive position – it allowed Sony to see the shape of the crash and respond accordingly.

The human element

Now you may be thinking that using technology solves the issue, that large data centers will now be chugging away sucking in data and spitting out hit lists of users for the marketing department to bombard; not quiet.

Fortunately for us ( the consumer ) all of this data does need interpretation to give context and meaning.

Just like any other form of market research these maps showing the flow of sentiment and conversations require the human touch to gauge it’s importance and also ensure that our brilliant ability for sarcasm does not suddenly mean efforts are wrongly targeted.

technology marketing

links :

marketing technology

Sonar - Trampoline systems

Seer - VML

Truview - Visible technologies

2008 - A bad start to the year

This week the press is full of all the new ' stuff ' that is the future of technology from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

I'm more concerned with one thing that is being switched off - Pandora the music streaming service that plays music based on your personal taste will stop streaming to users based in the UK on January 15th.

Pandora delivers relevant content that is based on historical preferences BUT goes that little further by making suggestions and recommendations to help people broaden and experience new genres - it's a shame content owners are not flexible to allow new ideas such as these time to grow and flourish.

The letter from Tim Westergren explains in detail the why's :

As you probably know, in July of 2007 we had to block usage of Pandora outside the U.S. because of the lack of a viable license structure for Internet radio streaming in other countries. It was a terrible day. We did however hold out some hope that a solution might exist for the UK, so we left it unblocked as we worked diligently with the rights organizations to negotiate an economically workable license fee.

After over a year of trying, this has proved impossible. Both the PPL (which represents the record labels) and the MCPS/PRS Alliance (which represents music publishers) have demanded per track performance minima rates which are far too high to allow ad supported radio to operate and so, hugely disappointing and depressing to us as it is, we have to block the last territory outside of the US.

It continues to astound me and the rest of the team here that the industry is not working more constructively to support the growth of services that introduce listeners to new music and that are totally supportive of paying fair royalties to the creators of music. I don't often say such things, but the course being charted by the labels and publishers and their representative organizations is nothing short of disastrous for artists whom they purport to represent - and by that I mean both well known and indie artists.

The only consequence of failing to support companies like Pandora that are attempting to build a sustainable radio business for the future will be the continued explosion of piracy, the continued constriction of opportunities for working musicians, and a worsening drought of new music for fans.

As a former working musician myself, I find it very troubling.

We have been told to sign these totally unworkable license rates or switch off, non-negotiable...so that is what we are doing. Streaming illegally is just not in our DNA, and we have to take the threats of legal action seriously. Lest you think this is solely an international problem, you should know that we are also fighting for our survival here in the US, in the face of a crushing increase in web radio royalty rates, which if left unchanged, would mean the end of Pandora.
We know what an epicenter of musical creativity and fan support the UK has always been, which makes the prospect of not being able to launch there and having to block our first listeners all the more upsetting for us.

We know there is a lot of support from listeners and artists in the UK for Pandora and remain hopeful that at some point we'll get beyond this. We're going to keep fighting for a fair and workable rate structure that will allow us to bring Pandora back to you. We'll be sure to let you know if Pandora becomes available in the UK. There may well come a day when we need to make a direct appeal for your support to move for governmental intervention as we have in the US. In the meantime, we have no choice but to turn off service to the UK.

Pandora will stop streaming to the UK as of January 15th, 2008.

Marketing to the senses

In our real world we rely heavily on our 5 key senses , they influence our conscious and subconscious decisions moods and our behaviour.

For years department stores have played on all of these key elements in promotion and selling.

But what of the virtual world ?

On the web the sense of smell cannot be used, nor taste – these senses have to be evoked from our personal memories or by associations which we bring together in our mind to formulate this virtual picture.

Websites cannot translate the feeling of quality offered by touch, qualities such as weight and feel are impossible to translate through the click of a mouse. Of course these restrictions are not unique to the web, TV and radio have the same issue however the big difference is they are ‘ lean back ‘ mediums.

With the web and it’s interactivity there is an expectation to be provided with relevant and contextual information based on our enquiries, to be engaged, to have a dialouge. The relative infancy of the technbology means it’s full potential with regards to how and what information to present is still being realised.

Video improves sales

A recent survey from Vzaar found nearly 46% of internet shoppers have bought items online to find the item purchased was not exactly what they thought – the key hear is thought.

From a functional point of view this could be ‘ fit for the purpose ‘ – i.e a room freshener which does indeed freshen the room, however it fails to deliver the smell or effect only experience of the product could provide.

An interesting insight from the survey found over half the respondents said seeing a video would make them more likely to buy a product.

This makes a lot of sense, there are many feature comparison sites on the web but how do you convey a products actual size, look and functions in a manner over the web which we can relate – a simple picture is not enough.

Recognising the importance of video Dixons the UK electronics retailer have just collated all of their demonstrations ( it has been producing these for over a year ) into one place within their customer website.

If this were to be coupled with independent reviews from outside the groups website this could make for a great proposition to differentiate itself from it’s competitors.

key survey facts

• Six out of ten believe sites using video are more professional
• Half of all shoppers say seeing a video makes them more likely to buy
• Four out of ten shoppers have more trust in a site that uses video

M-Commerce

' point and shoot '

Nokia has announced a pilot in the UK for the phone to be used for payments. The handsets which will carry an RFID chip will allow users to ‘ swipe ‘ there phone on the London Underground to pay for journeys – presently the ‘ Oyster ‘ scheme operates across the entire underground and allows commuters to use a dedicated card which is ' swiped ' over special readers for the journey and is 'topped up‘ with credits.

marketing technology

In another recent trial in London, Oyster partnered with Barclaycard to allow for low value purchases to be made using the card.With the incorporation of the technology into the phone the UK can start to catch up to the wider use of this kind of technology in the Asian markets.

News International has started to incorporate QR codes on their most popular title ‘ The Sun ‘. QR codes or ‘ Quick Read ‘ codes will be present through the title over the coming months and will allow users to ‘ scan ‘ the codes to then receive content directly to there phones. The software is now incorporate into most new Nokia handsets and is downloadable from the web for other handset manufacturers.

While this still requires a download to the majority of handsets and the fact people in the UK are far happier with SMS codes I am not entirely sure of the viability of this method to direct people to ‘ content ‘ .

Schemes to extend barcodes to mobile are nothing new, however the application of this technology makes far more sense in this context.

Satisfied customers are your best sales people....

Positive Word of Mouth, making your customers brand advocates is today an important part of any marketing strategy.

With the clutter and the shear volume of advertising ‘ spam ‘ we are all subject to, trusting and listening to others who have already experienced a brands many touch points ( sales team, call centres ) and used its products or services, gives us an authentic message no marketing department can replicate.

After all whose interests do they have at heart ?

Previous posts around WOM spreading product adoption through recommendation have all given positives to this medium. However as with all positives there are negatives.

None better demonstrated than through a recent article on a colleagues blog about creating positive relationships, his example of how not to do this was taken from a kitchen manufacturer called Moben.

Reviewing user ratings of both the companies service and product comments made on the price comparison site DooYou, it was a good opportunity to apply a simple but effective method for measuring customer satisfaction – Net Promoter Score ( NPS )

About NPS

A simple question is asked with a scale of between 0 and 10 – “ How likely is it that you would recommend us to a friend or colleague “ .

Score

• 9 – 10 you are classed as a promoter
• 7 – 8 are passive
• 0 – 6 are known as Detractors
  

Promoters

The thinking is promoters are you brand advocates, the people who will likely recommend your company and it’s products to friends ( depending on the product and also the peer standing of these people will effect the pass on rate and acceptance of these recommendations – more here on this topic )

Passive

Neither a promoter of a detractor. Not likely to promote or air negative views.

Detractors

Will not be a long term customer, have a negative and will be vocal in their criticism.

Results

As you would expect gaining a NPS of 100% is the highest accolade an organisation could hope for, however in the real world star performing score in the high 80%’s, with most companies occupying the 10 – 5% space.

Those with a negative number are in trouble, customers are defiantly not happy.

Why is NPS it important ?

Studies conducted have linked NPS to a companies financial performance against it’s peers.

Research from the London School of Economics ( Advocacy Drives Growth ) has shown companies with high ( NPS )and therefore higher word of mouth advocacy out perform their competitors.

More importantly the research found a 1% reduction in negative word of mouth, led to over £24 million in additional revenues.

While there is debate as to whether a single number can predicate a companies success, there can be no doubt people willing to promote your company can only be positive.

Now Moben - Winner or Looser ?

Applying NPS to the feedback on DooYou, they scored a worrying

– 56% *, a definite looser.

NPS Stars

* The scoring used was not in line with the 0 – 10 NPS uses , therefore the following scale was applied . 5 -4 promoter, 3 passive and 2 - 1 Detractors.

Sources Wikipedia, http://www.netpromoter.com.

1000 Albums to hear before you die

Three great things about this list now that technology is involved.

• You can listen to all the tracks easiliy through music portals


• The list can be changed, voted and ammended over time in a fluid manner with the use of blogs


• Evidences a tradional media channel making good use of new technology to drive people between print and the web.

One thought though - They could have gone one step futher and teamed up with iTunes or Amazon ....

View the list : http://music.guardian.co.uk/1000albums

Are you being heard ?

marketing technology, e-newle Are retailers really listening ?

Two interesting studies I have come across that highlight the place of technology in the relationship between organisations and the customer.

The first polled over 1,000 people to gain their opinion on how technology affects their dealings with organisations, the other a poll of over 100 top online retailers which involved signing up and analyzing their e-news letters.

While positive’s are within the reports the overall picture is not particularly favourable

First impressions count – e-newsletters

Within the online world there is an expectation of timeliness to communications and fulfilment, delay in these aspects can only damage perception and customer loyalty – with differentiation of products and services becoming less obvious this is one key element companies must use marketing technology to excel in.

Of the 118 retailers whose e-newsletters were subscribed

• 20% took more than 30 days to deliver their first regular email or failed to deliver at all.


• 30% didn’t deliver their first regular email within 14 days two weeks of the subscription date.

Consider this : the Spamming act ( excerpt ): The spam act - Any opt-out mechanism you offer must be able to process opt-out requests for at least 30 days after you send your commercial email. When you receive an opt-out request, the law gives you 10 business days to stop sending email to the requestor's email address.

The report points outlines the 10 days un-subscribe limit being reduced, this would impact these organisations and open them to spam reporting and abuse - simply because of their slow time to react and respond.

Frequency and subscription

Negative

Over 93% of the retailers gave no indication of how many emails to actually expect. Setting this level of expectation firstly confirms with the consumer their preferences, also by allowing them to consciously choose and decide you are entering into a dialogue – they will also ‘ expect ‘ and are more likely to read the email once delivered.

Add to this options on the content type and the format by which they wish to receive, you are tailoring the communications to what the customer actually wants, not what your marketing department would like to send.

Positive

The confirmation page is becoming more frequently used, with single email address subscription being asked for initially – further detailed capture of user information is only then being asked for in the confirmation email.

Splitting this into two parts benefits the user in not having to labour over multiple pages in the initial sign up phase. The retailer will undoubtedly have higher response rates and is able over time to slowly request information, using offers and information as reward.

People's view on Technology

There seems to be more examples of how things are done badly in the customer service world than good. Technology is used in many ways to assist our dealings with organisations, but are they really interested in the customer or merely meeting a need which they have to fulfill – begrudgingly.

Presenting first line contact centre’s with relevant information on customers is nothing new, however how this is used, the tone and the type of dialogue during these conversations can make all the difference in maximizing both the satisfaction for the customer and can give increased sales opportunities to the organization.
marketing technology.
It confirms this by highlighting over 60% of people think technology should make communicating with the brand easier and a similar number think they should be instantly known by the company, no matter which division they are dealing with.

However it seems there is a long way to go in achieving this :

Speed matters more to companies than customer service , 78% of consumers believe that companies focus on the speed of transactions rather than customer service and that the technology used is too impersonal.

Perception versus reality ?

Two-thirds of the people we spoke to said they’d regularly encountered difficulties when dealing with a company over the phone when attempting to do something as simple as placing an order or making an inquiry.

• Over 90% of consumers don’t think that the technology is available to make things easier when dealing with a company over the phone, through the web, on e-mail or even via SMS.


• Over a third of consumers think the technology to know who they are and what they want,whatever part of the business they deal with, is at least five years away.

Reference

Retail Email Subscription Benchmark Study

'Computer says no': British consumers slam customer service merry-go-round

The importance of Word of Mouth

UK lags behind US in user generated reviews

Recent research shows that there is a huge opportunity for UK based websites who offer ratings and reviews for there products to gain an advantage over their competitors.
marketing technology
In the US three out of four consumers stated it to be extremely or very important to read reviews before making a purchase – in addition to this they also said they prefer peer reviews over expert reviews by a 6-to-1 margin, highlighting the importance of Word of Mouth as a marketing strategy.
blogging
The report shows that in the UK showed that reviews and ratings were important for around 50 per cent of consumers – this would increase should more UK based retailers adopt the strategy.

Peer review

Previously I wrote on the effects of Word of Mouth on product recommendations and also a way of service providers to gain credibility and important peer review portfolio online.

This is especially important as the differentiation between companies becomes less and less - esepcially when your offering is open to price comparison sites.


Differentiation

The timing of the report coincides with WalMart,the worlds biggest retailer announcing the launch of customer ratings and reviews on walmart.com.

It is evident with this there competitors are catching up with the buy low stack it high mentality that has made them the market leader.

This offering now adds additional value to there customer base which is quoted as being over 130 million people, a customer base that is now actively invited to participate offering Walmart a chance to gain valuable insight and extended the relationship beyond the till.

Wall Mart

“The reviews will be available for all products offered on the company's website and will provide consumers a forum for sharing their opinions about a wide variety of consumer packaged goods -- from batteries and dental floss to lip balm and shampoo.

Reviews and ratings is the No. 1 customer-requested feature online at Walmart.com, and we're pleased to offer this service to better help our community of customers shop smart and make informed decisions about the products they purchase both in our Wal-Mart stores and online," said Cathy Halligan, Walmart.com's chief marketing officer.

Wal-Mart introduced a test phase of customer reviews and ratings in June to gauge overall performance and customer feedback which generated favorable results. In fact, customer review submittals more than doubled the company's expectations during the test phase with a significant number of reviews and ratings received in the categories of electronics, home and garden, media, and baby. Also, with today's official launch of the feature, close to 15 percent of items in these favored categories have published reviews.”
Source CNN

The end of the poster?

Terminal 5 , Heathrow's soon to be opened British Airways Terminal will have over 300 digital ' sites ' installed, representing over half the advertising real estate within the terminal.

It is anticipated over 27 million passengers will pass through the terminal per year - a good majority of these are classed as primary targets for advertisers.

Digital in this space allows felxibility and interaction - flexibility which will adapt information and messages as passengers pass through the different locations within the airport, interaction as BA hold some very useful information through their membership programs and partnerships that could be put to good use.

Search goes visual

visual results offer more information - a more complete picture

Pictures paint ......

Search today presents us with text – many argue this method is still the fastest and most effective way to present information. Agreed for sites which are purely information sources and have no content which is visual to either supplement or enhance this information, but many today are not ( even more so with new rich media capabilities of browsers and plug-ins such as Silverlight ).

The argument of text based search results goes back to the days when Windows and Apple desktop were launched.

Search today needs enhancement, a combination of both text and also images – basically the entire webpage delivered to the user, else it is like advertising an art exhibition by only using words.

Visual impact wasted

Web-pages are a rich source of visual information, ( in some cases this is the entire reason for the page) all of this is lost until users until they click through.

Couple this with the issue if you do not appear in the first 10 results then the time and effort of your site visuals is wasted.

Layers

This is where a new product from SpaceTime comes in.

Leveraging popular search Google,Yahoo,Ebay and Flickr ( more to be released ) it then displays the first 10 results in an almost identical manner to Windows Vista ‘ layers ‘. By then clicking on these windows it switches you to a familiar 2-D flat view of the web page for viewing.

Another nice feature is previous searches are placed in a toolbar at the bottom of the screen allowing for fast and easy switching.

This exploration of enhancing how search is a positive step to presenting the new media rich web sites in a graphical format, it allows the full context of the page to be considered rather than just how it ranks in the world of search.

Why virtual TV will be a success , but for different reasons

Eletronic Arts and Endemol announced a interesting partnership which will expand traditional TV programming to the virtual world, with the release next month of their Virtual Me platform

EA the company behind such classic hits such as the SIMS, Endemol is the company responsible for bring the ‘ reality ‘ TV show Big Brother which now has local variations in over 70 countries.

Taking the concept from MySpace participants are able to create virtual selves ( or aviatars as they are commonly known on the internet ) to compete and take part in variations of these hit TV shows – not in person, but with virtual representations of themselves.

I have to say it is interesting Endemols decision to partner with EA rather than leverage and already established community that is second life, however it shows an interesting transition of thought by expanding the tradional position of TV programming onto the Web.

Money

Big Brother’s revenue comes from advertising ( not product placement ) and also mainly from the SMS voting that takes place to evict or keep the contestants ( know as housemates – ironically by the are at the end , they are anything but ).

But how would this work in the online space when this will not be an audience lead activity.

As yet there are no successful examples of pre-role ( the short advert placed before content of value / interaction ) on the web. Most is ignored through the ability to close or skip, the remainder is mostly irrelevant in either context or content, this therefore leaves :

Sponsorship

Pure and simple association to raise awareness, but without engaging in dialogue with these participants is there any real value in what will be in the short term at least, a niche market ( in both volume and type of player )

In game – virtual brands, signage and clothing.

Levi’s is apparently doing a roaring trade in 501’s online, how long will this last ?

In this lean forward world where people are participating rather than sitting back and observing using traditional signage such as posters cannot prove to be effective, the ability to clutter this restricted space is also a threat and could all but trash this opportunity.

Also, while engrossed how much awareness does this bring ? Ask a professional footballer what adverts were around the side of the pitch while he was playing.

Payment upfront

This seems the more likely , in order to win / participate you pay. Pure and simple gambling , all be it wrapped up in a different wrapper.

Exclusive

On the internet there could be 1,000 big brother virtual shows happening at any one time - nothing is exclusive on the internet , it needs to work the numbers.
Combine this and the fact no matter how advanced the technology, people have a wonderful ability to express and behave in subtle ways which at the moment cannot be replicated online – I challenge anyone to be entertained for any length of time sitting watching Second Life.

The one thing the TV has over the internet is exclusivity and to a degree, authenticity.


Know your enemy

Generally game shows are run with a degree of ethics, although not perfect as Who wants to be a millionaire cheat Major Charles Ingram will contest, they do through the ability of “ seeing is believing “ remove some of the trust barriers the internet cannot break down .

Virtual icons

Above is a virtual concert with star performers U2, although the virtual Bono has some fancy dance moves I would not pay to watch these unanimated objects for any length of time.

Would you pay to watch a virtual game of soccer, would these virtual avitars be the next location for marketing and promotion deals, will we ever have a ( god forbid ) virtual David Beckham?

By making the barriers to entry too easy, by leveling the playing field, it removes the draw and passion along with the appreciation of the attributes that make these people great and thus the desire for us to watch and appreciate – this will therefore never be an audience led medium no matter how much the technology fools us visually, therefore the revenue generation models should reflect this.

As Buddy ( aka Syndrome ) said in the incredibles ‘ I'll sell my inventions so that *everyone* can have powers. *Everyone* can be Super!

And when everyone's Super... No one will be.