Month: August 2014

Internet Ad Spend will Overtake TV Spend in …. Yawn.

A challenge to the tired internet-versus-television story, arguing that the real divide is between connected and non-connected advertising.

A couple of months ago, the same data from the PWC Global Entertainment & Media Outlook popped up a couple of times in my Twitter feed. I meant to write about it then, but I’ve got around to it now as part of my BEWA plan.

The most retweeted factoid stated that “By 2018, Internet advertising will be poised to overtake TV as the largest advertising segment” and concluded with the line “We are approaching a major tipping point in the advertising universe“.

I’ve made a career out of Internet advertising for more than 17 years. I delivered my first online ad a couple of years earlier as an online companion to a traditional radio spot. When we first started, these kinds of comparisons were helpful, not only to reassure us that we’d made the right career choice, but also to convince our bosses that this really was a growing market and that they might help us by employing another person to help us figure out what to do.

As an industry, we were pleased when online ad spend eclipsed various forms of print, billboards and even those radio ads I’d spent years working with.  I acknowledge it’s an interesting barometer and makes for some nice graphs for somebody’s next ‘speaking opportunity’.

But today, comparing the vast opportunities of ‘Internet Advertising’ as a single place of ad spend while breaking down ‘offline’ spend into its component segments doesn’t feel right to me. The IAB (using US-centric data) tells us that, in 2013, 43% of Internet advertising spend was search. Classifieds make up 6% of the Internet spend. There seems to be very little point in comparing these numbers to television.

(Much more significant for TV is the kind of spend-shift outlined in a Bloomberg piece about Nike, but that’s for another day).

Surely, it’s connected vs non-connected advertising. The tipping point is coming, but it’s not when Internet spend passes TV spend. It’s when spending on connected advertising surpasses non-connected advertising.

Footnotes

I don’t have access to the whole PWC Outlook, which may very well put these numbers into a more subtle context that 140 characters can not convey.

My BEWA project resulted in a post about one of the stars of the Australian television show Neighbours; an entry about writing the perfect technology RFP that allows companies to better work with you; a follow-up post about better user design, and this one about internet (or connected) advertising figures. Place your bets on whether there will be a post next Wednesday,

 

Improved By Design

A couple of months ago I wrote a thing about receipts and the utter pointlessness of P, T and M on that piece of paper. Admittedly, it’s not the most exciting piece of writing, was it? On the other hand, it appears I’m not alone with this line of thinking. Jack Dorsey, you know, one of the chaps that invented Twitter, apparently spoke at the US National Retail Federation’s annual Big Show conference (I suspect they are close to what I thought was a receipt industry) about this problem and ways the receipt can be better used as a communication tool to customers. If I were so inclined, I’d claim credit. You know, something along the lines of how smart people follow my thinking. But that’s pretty much a long shot, huh?

A little digging is a fascinating thing. It seems all sorts of pieces of paper could be improved with a small amount of design expertise. I was drawn to the idea of improving the receipt during an extended attempt to claim expenses for a recent trip. That trip included a train, a flight and several taxis. I know taxi paperwork is being improved: Uber and Kabbee do a great job of just emailing you the receipt after the journey – no more scribbled bits of paper that are incomplete. How many times have you had to add information to a taxi receipt yourself so that it was obvious what the journey was for? They’re clear on where I have been and how much the journey cost. And emails make them easy to retrieve when it’s time to claim those expenses from the people who sent you there.

Peter Smart's Boarding Pass

As it turns out, there are plenty of other people who think train tickets and plane boarding passes could also be improved. These are a bit more complex as, unlike many taxi receipts, they have to be shown while the journey is in progress. To that end, they contain lots of little nuggets that mean nothing to you and me but might be crucial to the ticket inspector or air stewardesses’ ability to quickly interpret the ticket. I like Neil Martin’s version of the British Rail ticket (others have had a good go too). But for some innovative thinking, take a look at Peter Smart’s version of the airline boarding pass. If you’ve ever had to look twice at your pass to see which terminal/gate you’re going from, then this redesign could be really helpful.

What I particularly like about both of the examples I’ve shown is the removal of industry speak. Those little airport codes, you know LTN to WAW, are really London Luton to Warsaw Chopin in real, human, understanding. Why not just say that? Unless the product is a business-to-business tool where the people using the system speak the language of the industry, it’s never a good idea to confuse with codes and jargon; and even in industry-specific systems I’m not always convinced. In the airport, the departure screens don’t show WAW, so why should the ticket?

There will be those who think a digital ticket/boarding pass is the solution, but that experience needs improving too. My British Airways mobile phone app once showed a partner airline’s flight number for the journey, so the on-board crew were very confused, and I’ve known people who have stood at the front for five minutes or more rebooting a crashed phone so they can show a ticket and take their seat. Paper may be around a while for those things.

Now I just need an original idea for something to redesign.

Further Reading: This post is a follow-up to I Don’t Want A Useless Paper Receipt and is also the third in my BEWA posts. The first was a rather random post, BEWA: Sound the alarm! All the letters have been taken. Last week’s post was Elsewhere: Writing the perfect RFP.

Elsewhere: Writing the perfect RFP

One of my former colleagues, Louis, has written a piece on LinkedIn about the process some companies go through when putting together a Request For Proposal (RFP) for a major technology purchase. His essential point, that the process – especially in the larger corporates – doesn’t really lend itself to the best outcome for the ultimate system users, is well made. 

I’ve been meaning to write something about this process for some time because, so often, it prevents a technology seller from working closely with the buyer to tailor the response (and, therefore, solution) to meet the ultimate business goal. This is done in the name of fairness and transparency, which is, of course, a laudable process, but if it doesn’t get the best outcome, is it the right one? Although he’s writing in the context of marketing analytics, the words could just as easily be written for the ad tech industry and – probably – for any major modern technology purchasing decision. Most of today’s tech solutions are complex and can be used in whole (or in part) in many ways as well as being integrated closely with existing systems. What this means, of course, is that there really isn’t a single solution to a customer’s problem from any vendor but a number of approaches that are best discussed and evaluated beyond a series of ‘compliant/not compliant’ statements in a document. Louis suggests some initial stages which are much more discussion than Q&A. I’ve seen – and been involved in – pitches where this works very well. So, if you’re putting together any kind of technology RFP, then it’s worth reading to make sure you’re giving yourself – and your tech partners – the best chance of success. Here was my small addition to the conversation:

Great advice. The RFP process in many areas is broken. I was once part of a team that was begged to complete an RFP for which we were not a good fit by a prospective client: a process that benefitted nobody but a procurement checklist. I really like your alternative suggestions. But do you really think that your alternative approach requires a lot more time upfront? I don’t think it does, but it needs a different kind of relationship with vendors. In many organisations there’s already a large team putting an RFP together, and it’ll go through many iterations before finally being issued, so your alternative is just changing the way people evaluate the market: it needn’t take that much more effort. Having said all that, sometimes it’s best to accept that the RFP is the beginning of a process, not the end. You may lose an individual RFP, but that can mean the start of a business relationship.

Further Reading: This piece was written in response to ‘Writing the Perfect RFP‘ by Louis Fernandes and forms the second in my BEWA series. The first was BEWA: Sound the alarm! All the letters have been taken.

BEWA: Sound the alarm! All the letters have been taken.

Sound the alarm! All the letters have been taken. It’s impossible to come up with a new acronym for anything anymore. BEWA, for instance. It’s been used. At least twice. It’s the British Equestrian Writers Association and the Business Educators of Western Australia Inc. It is also a Singaporean fashion brand and a village in Jamtara district of Jharkhand state, India. And I just wanted to start a meme. Not that I really have the ability to do that, but, you know, it was an idea.

I hear you cry, “A meme? Are you sure?” And you would be right but indulge me for a moment.

I just paid the hosting fee for curnow.org to the folks at Dreamhost again.  I host my own site on some rented server space there. It’s been with them since 2002, and I can’t remember the company that did it before, but I don’t think they are around anymore. The idea was simple: own my own space so I am not at the whim of a dot-com business that might not be there tomorrow (this was 2002 and Web 1.0’s bubble had well and truly gone bang).  I think I was inspired by Phil Gyford’s website and the idea of collecting all my own web content in one place.

I once wrote that the reason for building a site like this was because, “The ideals of a less censored form of communication, open and available to all, appeals to some deep belief I have in the basics of human community”.1  Of course those are the wild ramblings of an Web 1.0 idealist and you only need looks at the comments on any newspaper website to see how utterly nonsensical I was being.

But, having paid for another year, I began to think about why I cough up this money, given I don’t really write a great deal here when I could host a simple site for free in many places. Go and check out the beautifully simple curns.me for something along the lines of my original plans for this site.

Then, on Monday, somebody asked me about Google search and websites. I know very little about this. So I did a bit of research and looked at the search terms that got people to curnow.org. So, hello all you Ashley Paske fans (for the kids, he was Matt Robinson in Neighbours sometime in the last century). There’s a reference to him here, and it seems to drive people to look. And the picture isn’t there anymore, so I will have to look at that and fix it one day.

So much for the more worthy stuff I wrote about personalised radio and why we should all stop thinking that news is something that can be easily defined.

All this led me to think that I ought to try and add some new ramblings here just to justify the payment and get people here for some other reason. Which led to my big idea – BEWA: Blog Every Wednesday in August. Catchy, don’t you think? And so I will try. Don’t hold your breath.

Footnotes

1 Originally written in a post entitled ‘Reasons‘, July 2000