Standard Class

Congratulations to Cameron Riley on the 200th show of Gday world. Cameron started the podcastnetwork around the jewel of Gday world. Gday word is a must to check if you are new to podcasting or even if you are a veteran but there are also loads of other great shows on the podcastnetwork. My personal favourites after gday world are the Edinburgh fringe podcast and the Productivity show when they are podcast! Well done Cameron, keep the independent, irreverent and intellectual insight coming

The world of work is changing, the rise in individuals working as freelance professionals is growing fast however the support structures which have been lagging behind are beginning to catch up. Trendwatching.com points to The village quill and Two rooms as two examples in New York of an office away from home. These physical locations are growing quickly in major cities around the world as individuals demand more than perching in an armchair in Starbucks. What is really needed however is a co-operative style outsourcing operation, a network of resources for independent operators, which would provide services such as tax, invoices, receptionists, mailboxes, legal support, it, server space, email, software, travel booking etc in time even a global network of physical locations. The buying power of such a group would be huge and if benefits were passed on to members the incentives to join would grow. It might be the difference between being able to jump the corporate ship to go it alone and being tied to the grindstone.

I am not sure why, but I was surprised to find Flickr blocked when I tried to access it from Dubai. Everything about the country is trying to move forward at pace. I am sure that the nature of some of the images are "inconsistent with the religious, cultural, political and moral values of the United Arab Emirates" and it is their responsibility to do what they feel is right for their citizens but is it really worth the opportunity cost of preventing what could be a breakthrough tool and others like it, on the back of which some of their citizens could be creating interesting, innovative and profitable companies which could be the future of the UAE?

Twenty-five years ago it was estimated that just five TV advertising spots would reach 80% of the audience, while today more than 300 such spots would be needed for a similar reach.

Content owners take 70% of the revenue from Google Video , even in these fast changing times content is still king.

Listening to Cameron Reilly's GDAY world I was disappointed to hear that another of his listeners (that must make 28) has been receiving Spam over Internet Telephony on his skype phone. I suppose i should not be surprised, it is a great early adopter target audience however the conversion rate must be dismal!

Bristol council have taken the enlightened view of asking residents what they think of renowned artist Banksy's latest piece on the side of a sexual health clinic. He did not have permission so it is technically graffiti but it looks like it will be allowed to stay. Is this the thin end of the wedge? Who will try to push the limits next? I think that it is witty and should be allowed to stay.

Jack has been sitting at the table with clients for a number of years but only on an ad hoc basis . He feels that the time has come when he needs to become more connected .
He feels that the time has come for buyers to re-enter the limelight. Buyer need to do better and more detailed deals in order to create new media spaces within branded content.
Media sales had to separate from ad agencies to integrate more closely with clients . He feels that media sales need to do 5 things.

1. need to abandon the assembly line nature of Advert Programming
2. need to stop arguing over who owns the planning process
3. Bespoke for all screens-not just spun off the 30 second spot
4. Move beyond mainstream media- need to buy and sell experiences
5. Strategic client connections the clients want to get closer

In conclusion we need to understand where the consumer is.

Jack is the third speaker at the IAA conference to recommend Thomas Friedman's book " the world is flat" I have not purchased it myself yet but it is either a great book or Thomas is paying great commission.

What do the Queen, President Bush, Tony Blair and the Pope have in common? Yes they are all influential leaders but they also all own Ipods. Is this an indicator that the ipod should be over? At first only the hippest early adopter had an ipod, then it tipped and all young hip and trendy people had one. The fact that the pope now sports one probably means that Apple should destroy the ipod and make way for the next new thing. Unless they destroy their own success and push themselves to innovate a competitor will steal their crown.

Many companies in the past have realised that once you have a relationship with a customer it is much easier to make them happy. Once you have won their trust you can start to produce products not only to keep them happy but to make them ecstatic. With customers becoming more demanding and competition mushrooming companies that can do this are thriving. The role of the trusted aggregator will allow value to be added whoever is creating content. If you can sell customers a 12 part series based on giving the first episode for free you can create the remaining 11 episodes to fit your customer base. The better you know them the closer they become tied to you and the better your product can become for them.
Is there a niche interest group out there that numbers perhaps 100,000 that would pay £10 for a film or TV series that was tailored to their interests? With £1,000,000 you could certainly produce or partner with existing programming to create exactly what they want.

Already newspapers have ceased to be a source of the truth and, if they are any good and wish to survive, are becoming our trusted editors.
The important function that remains is editing, they create brands based on what is not in rather than what is in a newspaper. They create a world view and tone of voice that becomes a familiar way to receive news.
This personal voice creates a loyal audience, over the last century this audience has been leveraged in print advertising and more recently in broadcast news with television advertising. In the future similar brands will be willing to pay for the attention of this audience, the basics have not changed just the execution.

The traditional marketing agency model is flawed in today's fast moving and changing environment.
Agencies need to believe in their ideas and invest in them, clients need to reward this risk but also get better at partnering with agencies and sharing the risk. Both agency and client need to get closer to consumers not only to know them better but to work with them. Without using consumers as marketers the task has become too huge, there is no longer a "mass" to target with mass media, instead there are hubs of niche interest groups who all need to be engaged and informed.

"Change is hard. Change is hardest on those caught by surprise. Change is hardest on those who have difficulty changing too. But change is natural; change is not new; change is important." David Schlesinger, Reuters America

Advertisers used to work on the theory that he who shouts the loudest for the longest period of time gets the attention of the crowd. There are two flaws to this idea in the modern market place. The first is that there are very few crowds any more, without this crowd there is no mass for the mass media to target. Marketing has to become much more nimble and work much harder to earn the attention of those who have traditionally been found in front of a box paying attention to your advertising. The key words here are paying and earning. Marketers need to earn the attention of their audience, without this attention it is like shouting at a crowd with ear plugs. If you have been on the tube in London recently you will notice that this is literally true, everybody is plugged into headsets in their own little worlds.
Marketers need to get consumers to want to remove their headphones and listen, to engage in dialogue and to market with rather than at consumers.

There are three things that are key to the future of the ad industry according to Allen:

1. Owning client branding
2. Connecting with the consumer - consumers will decide which technologies they will adopt and how much they will pay.
3. Capture consumer attention with the most compelling content

Steve has 5 principles of economic growth, if you have these your country wins, without them you get left behind.

1. Rule of law - to make it a stable investment opportunity
2. Ease of setting up a legal business
3. Taxes - lower them and increase prosperity
4. Stable and sound monetary system
5. Low barriers to trade both internally and externally

The Lebanese minister of finance was very open about the branding opportunity his country is facing. Post the Cedar revolution they have reached a cross roads, one route leads to the world seeing the Lebanon as a "Bastion of freedom, peace and economic prosperity." The other route does not bear thinking about for the Lebanese people. Their future will rest in the branding of their country .They must grab this opportunity with both hands. The work they are doing at www.rediscoverlebanon.com is a good start.

Sergio Zyman self confessed marketing visionary had some interesting points to make, he sees the goal of marketers as:

To sell more stuff , to more people more often for more money more efficiently.

Hi is a pragmatist and believes that marketing needs to create top and bottom line growth, every $ needs to be accounted for. Marketing needs to engage in the growth agenda of the client company.
He was quick to note that the bud 'wassup` campaign was award winning and got most of the western world saying wassup, but sales of bud declined.

Having been the first CMO of Coke he had some interesting insight on the soft drinks industry which is applicable across sectors- Soft drinks are purchased with disposable income , they are not competing with other soft drinks but with all minor purchases.

He sees the primary role of marketing as the creator of organic growth .Marketing is the last tool to leverage for corporate growth. Nobody ever made any money by making things, you have to sell then to do that.

Having worked on political campaigns he explained that the marketing of politics is an interesting bench mark , do you set yourself a target of 51% market share? Do you have a date by when this target must be achieved? If you fail do you have to wait four years to try again? This is what politicians do and it certainly focuses the mind.

The number of touch points are being reduced so the quality of these touches needs to increase.

Sahar is a serial entrepreneur, she researched her coffee shop idea by stopping at every station on London's circle line and checking out the coffee offering. Her presentation was engaging and amusing with some great nuggets:
"Comfort zones are a fallacy"
" leap and a net will appear"
"entrepreneurs do not listen to the voice of reason ,they have to switch it off"
"you need to be clueless to compete with the established companies, if you are not clueless your vision is clouded by past success and failure."
"Anything worth doing is worth doing badly ,you will get it right eventually"
Most entrepreneurs need funding, Sahar chose to go down the bank route and with her ethos of never giving up "I like to fail 99 times and succeed in the end, if I succeed first time round I am very suspicious" she soon realised that every bank manager had digression over approving a loan she pitched to bank managers until she got what she wanted.

"Be creative, be strategic, deliver value"

Emergency room statistics state that more people are admitted every year for non-dog bites than dog-bites—which is to say that when you see a Pit Bull, you should worry more about being bitten by the person holding the leash than the dog on the other end.

John Pallant of Saatchi and Saatchi injected some life into proceedings and used the three huge screens to wake up the whole room. He has been concentrating on creating "Ad's that don't look like ads" and showed some interesting work they had done in Poland for amnesty, still using traditional media of print/web/radio/poster but in an innovative way.
He is also interested in communications ideas that do not look like communications ideas
He noted that there are now lots of good ideas out there with high production values so you now need great ideas to stand out from the crowd.
The more global work he takes on the more levels of sign off he sees which leads to massive watering down of ideas to please the lowest common denominator.
He made a great point that audiences are as accessible as ever but are no longer captive, they are more demanding and you should not presume that because they are looking at your campaign that they are paying attention.
He is a fan of Kevin Roberts concept that he outlines in his book SISOMO, in which he theorises that audiences pay attention to sight sound and motion
He realised that creatives do their best work when;
They have a new creative director to impress
They form a new copy writer/ art director team
They have just joined a new agency
When they are out of the office
When they are running out of time

He created Saatchi TRIBE, to put creatives onto the edge where they perform best.
They created teams of three from employees all around the world on an ad hoc basis dependant on the client needs, they work under a new creative director and are subjected to 2 days of high pressure work. They brainstorm for short periods, between 20 minutes and an hour. These elements all encourage cross fertilisation and lateral jumps of ideas.
Clients are encouraged to brief teams personally and there is always a planner present to keep the creatives on track and to the brief, or to amend the brief if necessary. The client returns at various points to allow them to take ownership early on and become an internal champion.
The main power driver of the tribe is the diversity of the group in an environment of ego free co-operation.
The clients are willing to pay more for this service and get real business results whilst having a bit of fun.

Norman is senior adviser of Time Warner, Norman is very unusual as he is not young and he is American. Against all the odds however Norman gets it.

He said some interesting things:

• The one to many model lost sight of the customer
• Individuals voices are rising along with collaborative sites and vastly improved search
• Newspapers offer - Timely information, maintainers of record, transactions (small ads) the internet does all these things much better.
• There is still an ageing population who will be consuming newspapers for a while to come
• There have been a dilution of quality in TV, more news, less resources to get stories.
• Magazines have been slower to move as they do not need to be timely, maintainers of record or carry small ads.
• News websites are lagging behind the consumer, they are just brand extensions not collaborative or networked.
• News organisations need to renew their commitment to credibility
• News organisations need to ask much more searching questions of the government's actions.

The good and the great from the advertising Industry are meeting in Dubai over the next three days I will let you known how it goes.

With the tyranny of too much rearing it's head at every step I believe that aggregation is the future. I do not want to spend hours researching what car is best for me, I want to take the advise of somebody like me. I do not want to check out all the video on demand downloads, I want somebody like me to set up Charlie TV so I can try what they believe I would like. I can see that companies which create niche personalised aggregation portals with feedback mechanisms will run our lives in 5 to 10 year's time. I would be happy to outsource my purchasing power to an organisation like this. Instead of advertising I would tell my outsource service I would like to download a new tv series/ try a new band etc and trust them to do it for me. Buying a new car would take seconds, I tell them my budget and they tell me what I should have based on an existing profile and including a pre-negotiated price. This is the paradox of choice, we would get the most suitable product for the best price and have more time to enjoy it safe in that knowledge.

It is extremely interesting to see Der Spiegel using a link up with technorati on it's online news offering.
At the bottom of any article you can click on the : Blogs discussing this story link and it will take you to blogs doing just that.
Some news brands see blogs as a threat, the fact that Der Spiegel embraces them clearly marks them out as a news brand that will survive. People need to trust the brand in news delivery, this trend was started by the BBC who link to related sites alongside their articles, hats off to Der Spiegel for going a giant leap further.

Internet commerce was invented for industries such as travel and sites like lastminute.com and expedia have thrived on aggregating flights and balancing demand. Their services pales into comparison however when you visit Kayak . I used to be a real deckchair fan but this site is a whole leap into the future. I find the timings search in the toolbar particularly easy to use.

What's more dangerous? My competition knowing my plan or my 10,000 employees not knowing my plan?

SWEETBAY SUPERMARKET PRES/COO SHELLEY BROADER, ON WHY SHE'S OPEN ABOUT COMPANY INFO, TAMPA BAY BUSINESS JOURNAL 1.10.06

Seth Godin got me thinking when he asked "What's your reason?". He was explaining why many people do certain things, invariably because they always have done it that way. He reminded me of the importance of re-invention, keep asking why until you find the real reason. Keep innovating, failing fast and reinventing what you. Keep the reason for doing what you are doing so fresh in your mind that you never have to ask yourself the question "What's your reason?".

There are two types of businesses, those who have fallen into the trap of doing one thing well and those who are flexible. If you can only do one thing well you will keep investing in it until the market disappears. The nimble businesses will continue to innovate and use their core skills to create the future of the industry whatever that industry might be.

There has been a lot written about the effects of HDTV on stars. Philip Swann of TVPredictions.com singles out Demi Moore whose skin appears "coarse and leathery" and Donald Trump who looks "puffed up and covered with an odd mixture of orange and white" amongst others. Whilst HDTV will shorten some star's careers it will also bring to the forefront the skill of lighting. Badly filmed HD material will be much more obvious than the equivalent filmed on dv cam. Consumer generated HD material once it starts to arrive will be positively scary!