Month: September 2008

In Recovery Mode

For most of the weekend before last (and parts of the week either side), I was in Amsterdam at IBC.

How long does it take to recover from a week in Amsterdam? Given that it’s now Monday, I would say about five days. Of course, your mileage may vary, etc., etc.

For most of the weekend before last (and parts of the week either side) I was in Amsterdam at IBC. IBC is essentially an enormous broadcasting technology conference & exhibition, although it is aimed at the electronic media industry. While the focus appears to me to be technology, there is, apparently, a decent representation from the creative side of the industry. It’s been around for years, and it’s quite important to many in the broadcast sector. While I’ve known about it for a long time, and have watched colleagues go before, I’ve never been myself. Upon arrival at the conference, prepare yourself: I found the size quite daunting. I suspect extensive, advance planning for your visits/meetings, etc. is the key to the experience.

Friends often ask me about this kind of event. Is it a trade show, conference, or a place for old friends to meet/excuse for a drink? Well, I know that this time I probably encountered the lot, but I have never been so exhausted after a conference in all my life, which is why it’s taken me five days to get the photos up onto Flickr. Although the hotel that they put us up in was very nice, central & restful, there is a lot (an awful lot) of walking. Tip: take a map showing the location of the RAI conference centre and your hotel. Walking between the two may be a trek, but it saves waiting for the cabs or trams as the centre closes each day.

The thrilling thing (at least for me) was that it was the culmination of many months of work to have our advertising management tool deliver targeted, addressable advertising to video-on-demand systems. Microsoft, of course, had a fantastic stand in the Topaz lounge where all sorts of great technologies were being showcased. Check out some of the things Silverlight can do. But for me, the television screens in the corner connecting AdManager to Mediaroom were what it was all about. This meant that I stood for many hours, watching the same video clips and advertisements (and I still want a pizza despite – or perhaps because of – seeing a pizza ad several hundred times), but the response from customers, partners & prospects was great. You can read about the Mediaroom Advertising Platform in the official press release for the event.

I think targeted, addressable advertising is the future of advertising, and I don’t think that’s a big announcement at all. Many people in advertising will say they’ve been doing it for years. What’s direct mail advertising, after all? However, in the digital world, the key issue will be defining what is meant by targetable or addressable. Many years ago we used ‘targeting’ to describe how we were able to place an advertisement on a particular page on a website. Other areas of the advertising industry have used it to describe demographics or audience segments. Isn’t Amazon’s “customers who bought” suggestions a great form of highly targeted promotion? The main problem is that we have no standard, industry definition of what we mean by targeted or addressable. Amazon knows my purchase history – it should be easy to target on that. But what about mobile or television advertising? How do we define what’s targetable? I agree that we still have some research to do in this area.

As an aside, it’s worth recognising that with little effort, many things are targetable, including personal data. But that’s not what I am referring to here. Privacy policies, user information, declared data, etc. are all within the scope of legislation and deserve a better piece of writing than this. No, I’m suggesting that the industry simply needs to standardise what it means by targetable advertising as a starting point for us all.

There were plenty of other people demonstrating similar things in this and related fields. It’s interesting to see that the television business is not, contrary to the predictions of YouTube doom, standing still. If IBC is any indication, there’s a whole heap of innovation for those of us who watch television, which could dramatically change our experience. I’m looking forward to seeing which ones make it to the mainstream.

Apart from watching television advertising all day, Amsterdam was a fun place to be. It was my birthday in the middle of it all; they brought me a dessert with a sparkling candle, and they took me to a great steak restaurant whose name I have lost and therefore can’t recommend. Thanks to all my UK colleagues for that. After we packed away, we took a canal tour to pass an hour or two before heading to the airport, arranged by some of my US colleagues (some of whom had not visited Amsterdam before).  There was even a bar showing American football and a late-night team of my US friends trying to explain the rules to me. I’m not certain I mastered them; I’m afraid. Sadly, there wasn’t enough time to catch up with my old friends from my days in the radio distribution business. Hopefully, another year.

It was an exhausting week, but a great glimpse of where we are taking the technology.

Disclaimer: the views here are my own and are not necessarily the opinions of my employer (who sent me) nor of customers (who I spoke to while there). You have read the full disclosure, haven’t you?

 

Update: 29 September: Added some links to related commentary at Connected TV.

Get Your Product Right Or Get In The Liferaft

If your product relies on advertising, in whole or in part, to fund your business model, build in advertising hooks and concepts from day one; otherwise, you may as well hand that VC money back.

I recently wrote about the problems I see with the assumption that advertising will pay for everything. Even in the month since I wrote that, world markets are moving in a direction that’s making us all look for a life raft. All of us except those who got the big bonuses over the last few years and didn’t blow them on an overpriced city pad. I hear they are in Indian beach huts.

My second point last time, and forgive me for shamelessly quoting myself, said, “If advertising is going to be central to your proposition, then make it central to your product development plans”. I’ve been thinking more about this, and I can’t stress how important it is. So, I’m going to say it again. And put it in bold: “If advertising is going to be central to your proposition, then make it central to your product development plans“.

There is a counterargument; I know. Get your product right first. When you get all the bells and whistles built into your product or service, then people will love/use it, and advertisers like that. Well, see my previous post: advertising can’t pay for everything in this world. If the advertising experience is poor for the consumer, you’ve blown the bit about getting your product right. If the experience is poor for the advertiser, then you have a mountain to climb to convince them to come back.

No, if your product will rely on advertising in whole or in part to fund your business model, build in advertising hooks and concepts from day one; otherwise, you may as well hand that VC money back and go and join all the bankers on a beach in India for a year or two. It doesn’t have to distract too much from your central product proposition, but you need to remember that it is core to your business proposition.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah”. I think that’s what I can hear you saying. “We won’t do that”. But I’ve seen great companies – big and small – make this mistake again and again.

I’ve lost count of how many websites I’ve met that add advertising after they’ve finished the content, system design, and build. And after they’ve spent a lot of money on the design, which happened not to have a brief to include advertising. Then they add the advertising spaces into the look and feel of the site, and the whole thing suddenly looks disconnected. The content system isn’t built to pass any intelligence back to the ad system, and they struggle to place ads in the right place. Worse, the content system has a content structure that doesn’t map to how the sales team want to sell the ads, so from the first sale, nobody’s expectations are met.

There are fewer companies I’ve met, but they exist, that build a way to have users register to use a product but don’t consider how that could enhance the advertising proposition to both the consumer and the advertiser. So it’s a separate system that doesn’t share intelligence. Several times I’ve seen teams re-engineer registration interfaces just to facilitate some use in the advertising mix (and remember, knowing you’re a registered user of a site can, sometimes, mean you see less – not more – advertising).

And while I’m talking about registration, you are asking for a little more than an email address, aren’t you? Gender and country – fields which don’t identify an individual in any way (unless your country consists of two people and only one of them is a man) can be invaluable in determining which advertisers might be interested in your audience. Crude, yes. Simplistic advertising, yes. But more data is better, and it’s a start.

Remember that you are selling audiences, not spaces. You need to know a little about them to construct a meaningful advertising proposition. However, you also need to remember that there are laws – with good reason – that mean you can’t invade an individual’s privacy. It’s a good trade. I get a product for free, and I tell you a little bit about me. You need to aggregate and anonymise data. If you have solid aggregated data, then you stand a chance of building a good advertising proposition. And in any product development, it’s a good idea to know your audience, isn’t it?

Whatever your product, think about how the ads will fit into the mix. It’s not just websites. Many years ago I worked with a company that specialised in sponsored SMS messages. You know the kind of thing. My team scores and you send me a text. Somebody else pays for the text. All very nice until you remember you need to send me the score and fit the sponsor message into fewer than 160 characters. And that sponsor text needs to include a message and, often, a response mechanism. You see the problem?

I could go on. But you don’t need me to rub it in, do you?

So, for one final time, if advertising is going to be central to your proposition …, oh, you get the point.