The year was 19 days old when the digital marketing industry reported what we think is the first properly significant story of the new decade.
YouTube (owned by Google) has apparently won the rights to stream live cricket matches from the Indian Premier League. This marks a significant stepping up of Youtube’s activities in an area which has become dominated by Rupert Murdoch’s Sky Broadcasting channels.
Given the amount of bad feeling and mudslinging that has been going on between the two companies, this is unlikely to extract a pleasant response from Sky.
The tail end of last year was dominated on the one hand by Murdoch claiming that Google was a parasite and on the other by Google saying that if Murdoch’s organisations didn’t know how to make money out of the traffic they receive from Google then it wasn’t their fault. I think many could be forgiven for thinking that Google is teaching a lesson with Youtube on how to make money in a new media world and that the intended recipient of learning is indeed Mr Murdoch.
If Google is therefore interested in broadcast media and has ideas of how to make money, is there anything to stop it from deciding to do the same thing with news media? Their entire argument is that money can be made, it’s simply that News Corporation doesn’t know how to do it, and whilst Murdoch’s empire has its friends and supporters in high places it is a brave person indeed who could stand up to the weight of Google’s coffers, it’s global reach and it’s board’s unashamed intellectual prowess.
If battle lines are being drawn and warning shots sent across boughs then this going to be a year to watch in earnest and one that at the end of which media will be unrecognisable from how it is today.
One of the big announcements last year was that Google had expanded it’s search robot’s capabilities to take account of Adobe Macromedia Flash files.
Back when I started building websites in the mid 90s I was lucky enough to work with some of the best young designers in the business at that time, many of whom now head up departments and whose every murmur is greeted with hushed reverence. At the time we were making things up as we went along because there wasn’t anyone who had yet defined specific rules of how to do things or demonstrated effectiveness as a standard. Most of the time we discovered new and interesting things because everyone I worked with was incredibly bright. One of the things that we embraced completely was Flash, and created some absolutely beautiful sites. Here are some lessons that we learned with pre release and early versions of the software
Flash wasn’t easily updateable. In fact every time you needed to make a change to a seemingly innocuous piece of text, you had to spend ages working on it, and present the client with a rather large bill that they didn’t appreciate. That problem got sorted when Flash started to talk to external data sources.
People get carried away with Flash. These were the days of the flash introduction and people seemed to think that having an advertising like introduction (similar to TV channel introduction animations was a good thing). Usability taught us that users didn’t stick around to watch them. Later a ‘skip this’ button was added to the animation and then it was (mostly) dropped completely as analytics showed us that users preferred to get straight into the meat and veg of a site’s serving and ignore any little tasty treat that stopped them getting to the content. The important thing we learned was that the web was not a broadcast medium and that lesson has stood me in extremely good stead over the years. It was about that time that I started using the phrase that a website is workhorse not a work of art. The key is to understand that the site is for the users not for the organisation producing it.
Flash couldn’t be seen by Google. This was the killer to the large flash sites as your content didn’t exist in Google and so neither did you. All but the clueless abandoned flash only sites in development, and the clients who insisted upon it pretty soon were having crisis meetings about how to get any meaningful figures on usage, whilst they looked at a pretty short report showing how many times the homepage had been viewed and not a lot else. Google’s announcement at being able to crawl and index Flash changed the rules of web design again.
Flash did find a place amongst Hybrid sites that presented information in HTML and also provided Flash animations. It meant that users could choose to view rich animations that delivered information as well as standard text and graphics. Sites that have persisted in this and not undergone redesign since the announcement in 2008 have run the risk of having their content duplicated in Google’s index and whilst I haven’t heard of specific examples of this particular scenario, Google did treat general cases of duplicate content with extreme prejudice. At any rate the writing has been on the wall for a company with a hybrid site to redesign it as matter of urgency.
Flash couldn’t be seen by every browser. In many ways this is still as much of a problem as it has always been. Computer browsers don’t treat Flash with the same disdain that they used to but a myriad of mobile and alternative device browsers have been added and the vast majority of sites do not account for them.
That brings me full circle. There was a belief in the beginning that Flash sites were brand building and I sat in meetings back then making claims about ‘brand and content coming together to provide a total experience’. I am less convinced of that argument now and have seen examples of content tests setting Flash based animations against standard HTML and graphics in comparison tests. The inconvenient truth that I have witnessed is that user tests seem to conclusively show that users prefer HTML.
My instinct tells me that Flash isn’t inherently bad, it is just used badly which gives it a bad reputation, but I also think that designers need to ask themselves very carefully why they elect to use Flash. In the end I come back to my two maxims. At any rate, I do hope that the all inclusive single Flash movie that people used to create and parade as a site will be a thing of the past. Users didn’t spend that much time on them.
The site is for the users to use and we should make it as intuitive and informing as possible.
Bing has finally launched in a full version in the UK today. We started taking a look at it when it became available as a Beta and obviously did as much as we could to understand how it aggregates its searches so that we were able to make whatever changes were necessary without harming our Google optimisation. It has enabled us to some high listings for a number of our key search terms which has obviously pleased us. Our take on this so far is that Bing is a perfectly respectable search engine that does what it says on the tin. That’s the problem really, it is absolutely fine but there is nothing there to make us immediately drop everything Google and switch to Bing. We first saw traffic coming through to interactive-mix.com on une 11th with terms such as “Interactive Marketing Agency” and variations of our company name featuring most regularly but since then Bing has produced 7.89% of our natural search traffic whilst Google has produced 89.47% of it. There is a massive gap between these two and Yahoo which has produced 1.32% and Ask barely registers at all with less than 1%
Even if we skew the date range to take the best advantage of Bing, Google’s dominance is barely dented and Bing achieved 8.26% of our total natural search traffic.
We are not claiming that this is representative across the entire web or even for our industry but the message to us seems to be clear that Google is still the dominant force in Search by a very long way and whilst Bing is the second most important search engine it still produces only a fraction of the traffic for us that Google does. This seems to show quite comprehensively that visitors to our site haven’t found a reason to switch their search to Bing. Obviously we are going to keep an eye on this and it is only the first official day for the new search engine, so we will keep people informed of how we see things shaping up.
I wrote yesterday about book publishing and predicted that the book was not dead and would continue with its admittedly minority but niche audience.
Newspaper publishing is less clear. Over crowded tubes and the increasing switch of commuters to pedal power has made a noticeable difference on the number of Times and Telegraphs left behind on the 7:43 to Liverpool Street in the mornings. Murdoch correctly predicted that news would be delivered digitally. What he failed to predict was the way that the value of news was commoditised and made freely available. On the one hand, the BBC has its mighty news service which breaks stories of interest throughout the day and on the other hand citizen journalism is providing some excellent news coverage that is trusted by more and more people. Then there is Google that aggregates it all together and makes it available at the type of a search string.
As a child I remember watching the movies of the thirties which many would say was the golden era of newspaper publishing. Reporters took on heroic levels of importance with a dogged determination to find the story and rush it to the editor’s office for inclusion in the morning episode. Even Superman was a journalist at the daily Planet and everyone knows that Spiderman took the pictures that mattered for the Daily Bugle.
Today however both Superman and Spiderman would have problems. Whilst they were holding the train one handed to stop it plunging into the river, everyone down below would be pointing their camera phones whilst a blogger sat in Starbucks and published the story as it happened. Superman could fly faster than a speeding bullet but could he conceivably fly faster than a wireless connection with broadband? I suspect not. Krypton’s last son would get scooped every time.
Please excuse me for vanishing into my childhood for a second but I think the analogy highlights the problem perfectly. Daily newspapers were all about the scoop and the strength of commentary. Even with super powers it is difficult for the news agencies these days to replace the person on the ground equipped with modern communication methods, so what hope does a mere mortal with a press pass have? Similarly an army of young boys in short trousers can never build a distribution network as efficiently as Google with its ability to help people “read all about it”
One of my favourite movies when I was growing up was All the Presidents Men, which is probably also journalism and newspaper publishing’s finest hour. The complex story showed two dedicated professionals use every ounce of their experience and professionalism (as well as a few little strokes) to get the story that ultimately removed a president from office. Never before, never since was the ethic of journalism so well highlighted.
I found myself wondering how it would go down if Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein found the story today. Would they have waited to publish in the Washington Post or would they have released it piece by piece in an anonymous blog to gather information in the form of other anonymous comments which would then be tweeted and linked across the world. One can imagine deepthroat.wordpress.com becoming one of the most read blogs in the world if it did play out like that and all the Presidents men wouldn’t have been able to stop it. The recent story of Trafigura which was first reported in WikiLeaks shows that the Internet is understood by everyone at the top of a story as a way to circumvent even legal attempts to stop the story being told. No need for Superman in that little episode. All you need is the power of the Internet.
Newspapers are hurting there is no doubt about it. Times and Sunday Times bulk bundles ceased to be given out to airlines and hotel chains this week and joins the same move by the guardian and Observer a few weeks ago. So what can publishers do to stop them taking their place amongst the ranks of the Dodo?
“With more and more marketing interactions conducted via digital media, it is now much harder for B2B brands to gauge what their potential customers think about their products or services, let alone understand where they are in the buying cycle.”
I can’t tell you how much that introduction annoyed me. Harder compared to when? Maybe they are referring to before the telephone was invented when every salesman put on his running shoes and took his starting blocks every morning to traipse door to door? Or maybe they are talking about after the telephone was invented but before the Internet when Direct mail, reply mail, market research and telesales provided expensive and low response methods to stay informed and up to date with all thing sales and customer related.
Personally I thought that the statement was ludicrous. The complexity of yesteryear was that quite often not enough information was available and so guesswork was employed. These days, there is so much information available that analysing it is a skill in its own right. My problem though is that relying on guess work against analysis is hardly more difficult to do. It might be more complex but difficult is the wrong word.
For a start if you want to find out what your customers think about you in the marketplace, just go to Google, Twitter or Facebook, and you can do so from the comfort of your own home. If you need information from them why not send out a well worded email and ask them? The email can point them at a webpage which securely connects with your database and then all you will have to do is look at the forecast. How is that difficult? It takes skill sure, and a bit of knowhow but difficult isn’t the word.
That leads me on nicely to the art of words. Marketing communications are all about words. Copywriters understand that words have colours, textures, tastes, feelings and volumes. These combine together to evoke a response from customers. Done well they will have customers flocking to find out more about you. Done badly they will annoy your customers and have them making a mental note to avoid you like the plague. No software solution has yet been able to replace good copywriting and the software that the email I received was probably not going to solve my reporting and analysis problems (mainly because I understand my customers and know what to measure and how and therefore do not need some generic jumped up spreadsheet to help me). Bad copywriting in the modern workplace will have people like me reaching for their blogs and sharing how bad your message is with the rest of the world.
I don’t watch much boxing, but when I do I like to watch a heavyweight bout. There is something so engaging about two giants landing thundering blows on each other. Any one of them would probably take your or my head off, but the recipient casually shrugs off the blow and jabs his way into his own point scoring punch.
Watching the Operating Systems marketplace is a bit like watching a boxing match at the moment. Absolutely everyone is getting in on the act. Sports fans may be interested in our facts thoughts and trivia on this
In the Blue Corner we have Microsoft Windows 7 with its snap too drag and drop. The ad we saw is available at the link below:
The problem that we have with this is that we can’t see a compelling reason to upgrade from Windows XP (which we understand and are familiar with). Neither could we see a compelling reason to upgrade to Windows Vista. Now a lot of people agreed with us about Vista and we strongly suspect that a pretty large majority of those people will think the same about lucky number 7. What we are not sure about is how many of the current Vista users will flock to purchase it.
Now on the same day that the Microsoft Ad was released Apple has filed a patent on an Operating System which has embedded advertising at its core. The full story can be found on Brand Republic::
The upshot though is that Apple has sounded out their intention to release an operating system that can be ad funded and therefore given free to consumers. Does this herald the crowning of a new heavyweight champion of the world? Well no not quite, because the patent actually requires you to interact with the ads before you can use any applications. If we think about this for a desktop computer then everyone having a coke and a smile or diet coke break before they can begin working is pretty intrusive and not terribly productive. Apple’s alchemist though is never stupid. If this was media that people wanted to interact with to find content through ads that were crucial to the applications then that would be a very different story. The only question is where would Apple find this kind of content that you could advertise? I mean you would need an entire library of publishing rights. Oh hang on…………..
In the wings we of course can hear (not see) the new kid on the block in training in the form of Google Chrome OS. We don’t know much about Chrome other than the fact that it is based around the concept of Cloud Computing where most of the work is done on the Internet using Internet tools rather than on the desktop. Given Google’s experience with media funding projects we can also expect that the OS will be financed from other means than retail sales. As an article on TechRadar notes:
“Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS,” says Google. “We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds.”
“People want to get to their email instantly, without wasting time waiting for their computers to boot and browsers to start up,” says Google.
“They want their computers to always run as fast as when they first bought them. They want their data to be accessible to them wherever they are and not have to worry about losing their computer or forgetting to back up files.
“Even more importantly, they don’t want to spend hours configuring their computers to work with every new piece of hardware, or have to worry about constant software updates.”
That’s pretty impressive talk if you (like me) booted a Windows computer this morning and then went to get a cup of tea and visit the men’s room whilst it went through all its checks and pre loads. It’s probably pretty scary if you are Microsoft and even concerning if you are Apple.
Of course posturing in the OS marketplace isn’t new. They all do it all the time. Apple quite famously aped the Microsoft Vista version and pricing model at their user’s conference a few years ago.
Although it still seems a bit confused according to a ZDNet article:
The standard retail pricing for Windows 7 will be £149.99 for Home Premium, £219.99 for Professional and £229.99 for Ultimate. The notional prices for the unobtainable upgrades for existing Windows owners are £79.99, £189.99 and £199.99 respectively.
However, UK shoppers will initially be able to buy the standalone product at upgrade prices for a limited period. “[The full retail price] is more than people would expect to pay,” said Painell. “We will be offering fully packaged product at upgrade prices from the launch to the beginning of next year.”
The Steve Jobs video above highlights exactly the problem and the dilemma for users of Microsoft. Who needs which version and what will they pay for it. £200+ price tags are pretty self flattering and quite possibly delusional when there are alternatives like OS X here now, and Chrome on the way.
I can’t help but feel that this is largely a marketing communications problem. There won’t be too many tears though across the industry for Steve Ballmer who was quite happy to bully and punch his way through the industry in Microsoft’s hey day. He had a genuine innovative thinker then in the form of Bill Gates. These days if Ballmer thinks something is a bad idea, it generally means it will go on to great success.
It may also be a crucial sign that Microsoft without Bill Gates is a bit like a heavyweight boxer without a fist.
