Rory Sutherland - the greatest speaker in marketing - 13.35

Rory - Vice-chairman and Creative Director of OgilvyOne London - on his excellent soapbox about the true value of media to brands. Too busy guffawing, gasping, wowing and drooling to write usefully here ... back later!

Andy Duncan CEO Channel 4 (UK) at Verge - 10.15

Key TV guy on new trends, obviously focusing on digital and multi-channel. Fascinated to hear what he has to say about advertising.

1) "Great TV means great programming". Remains as powerful as ever, according to AD. TV watching is going up (reach for salt pinch here)
2) Multi-channel - 60% of homes digital, 6m homes have Freeview, free Sky on the way and free Sat. "Takeup is driven by better consumer choice", more free homes predicted than pay. Sky and Cable to work hard to keep up here, although Sports in particular remains an issue.
3) Other digital matters ... new Nokia iPod-type phone, for example.

The consumer is becoming the media owner ... (me, not Andy here!) = critical trend for digital strategies.

3) "How rights issues will tend to hold back the revolution". Good point, especially of course in AV, while music is simpler in terms of clearance.

4) Stuff about "the future of Channel 4", and its role as an innovator. C4 "well-placed for opps in web and mobile". "Brands matter more than ever" (meaning within the broadcast business). New broadband documentary channel, "four docs" sounds interesting.

5) Thoughts on advertising? "No one really knows". Long term trends: Decline in BBC view share, commercial TV growth high relative to BBC, young audiences going up, opps to reach them growing, growing reach to niche audiences, mobile link-ups, but the key core idea is a TV idea. "What really makes a difference is the great Breakthrough idea: take risks and stand out".

Longer term, impact of PVR's dramatic but only from 5-10 years on. Mobile and internet tie-ups, but not major in AD's view.

Final comment: "For the agile, it's a world of opportunity".

VISA VEERS HEAVILY TOWARD ONLINE MARKETING

Ad Age
"VISA VEERS HEAVILY TOWARD ONLINE MARKETING"
We interrupt this blog for ... a blog about something else .... sort of.

Survival tactics for the age of the digital consumer - 10.00

Brian's tips for staying alive include:

1) Invitation and permission
2) Become better storytellers (after Rolf Jensen ... "The Dream Society")
3) Become a good "brand parent" (Not new ... bringing up the brand - written up in my book "Promiscuous Customers ..." 3 years ago, grrr!) Let go, exhorts Brian H ...
4) The critical role of Trust (also written up heavily in that book ... hmmmm ....)
5) Put your money where the consumer is (meaning, here, the Internet and mobile of course)

Live! from OgilvyOne's Verge event in London - 09.50

Excellent start to this one day showcase and discussion of new digital developments and trends in marketing with presentation from Brian Featherstonhaugh, CEO OgilvyOne Worldwide. Particularly striking look at Japan and Korea's advances in mobile e-commerce and media.

Hooray! TV-free ad buys into view at NAB!

NAB2004 Daily News Online
"'For the first time, advertisers are interested in exploring alternatives to television,' said Burtch Drake, president and CEO of the American Association of Advertising Agencies.
Drake said many advertisers are now asking agencies to produce plans that don't include any television buys, focusing instead on media that can better target specific demographic and geographic audiences."

Ad networks could expand to TV, mobile phones

sfgate.com
"Expanding their advertising network beyond Web pages could help Yahoo's and Google's businesses grow after reaching their limits online. The seeds are already in place, according to analysts.
Paul Palumbo, an analyst for AccuStream iMedia Research, an interactive media consulting firm, cited a Google video service introduced last week. Users will be able to download video files submitted to the site by amateurs and Hollywood alike, eventually accompanied by ads, he predicted."

Advertising's breaking out in all sorts of new directions ... now all we have to do is persuade folks to do new cool stuff. No doubt that the consumer's up for it ... now then, step forward agencies!

RSS Reaches Out for Enterprise, Social Networks

eWeek
"The enterprise is becoming a target for NewsGator Technologies Inc. as it preps a server-based version of its RSS aggregation service. Meanwhile, upstarts Rojo Networks Inc. and Onfolio Inc. this week expanded the availability of their respective RSS readers, each of which puts a new twist on finding and organizing feeds."

The quiet revolution proceeds: RSS has yet to really penetrate the broader user base - perhaps, undertandably, due to the geek factor which - even with the most user-friendly readers - is still prevalent. But wait a year or so ... great things predicted. You didn't hear it here first.

Dirty Harry?

New York Post
"Two NYPD veterans are being investigated by Internal Affairs for allegedly accepting payoffs from the motion-picture industry to arrest vendors of pirated DVDs, law-enforcement sources told The Post."

Fighting fire with fire!

AOL, XM to launch online radio service

CNN
"NEW YORK (Reuters) - America Online, the world's largest online service, Monday plans to announce a deal with XM Satellite Radio to launch a new online radio service that will deliver about 200 radio channels."

Music and Video Downloading

Pew Internet & American Life Project
"Broadband users are more skeptical about government anti-piracy efforts. Some 57% of broadband users believe there is not much the government can do to reduce illegal file-sharing, compared to 32% who believe that enforcement would help control piracy."

Mental floss ... read.

PSP US sales

Reuters.com
"Sony Sold 500,000 PSPs in Two Days in N. America."

Uh, that's a lot.

Piercing the peer–to–peer myths

First Monday
"Following years of lobbying by CRIA, a new reality is only now coming to light — music downloading is not responsible for the ills of the music industry and Canadian artists have not been harmed by the sales declines that have occurred over the past five years. Although faced with significant pressure to reform Canadian copyright law, it is increasingly apparent that the industry’s ills are not the result of peer–to–peer downloading. Moreover, the Canadian experience with private copying suggests that a levy system may provide an effective alternative to adequately compensate artists for lost royalties that may occur due to the current popularity of file sharing services."

Read this. Say no more.

Getting real about the download market

p2pnet.net
"'How do you like them Apples?' - is a phrase readily applied to a storm in the UK between Steve & Co and other members of the corporate music biz elite.
iTunes, only just starting to show a small profit after being launched in 2003, is a loss leader for iPod. But it’s much more than that for the Big Music cartel whose members use it to give the erroneous impression that a fully functional corporate online music business exists in Britain and elsewhere."

The rise of the consumer-generated media machine

MediaPost
"If you buy the argument that the end of so-called 'traditional media'is just around the bend, you need look no further than 30-year-old Rafat Ali to see the (minimally bearded) face of the new order.
The upending of the long-familiar paradigm, in which consumers drool at the laps of corpulent, ad-laden content-casters, is just about dead; a new citizen-centric media, a sort of me-to-you 'minimedia,' will soon rule. That's the vision of the youthful brigade driving this movement. And for now, the wind is definitely at their back."

Google To Host Home-Video Uploads

Internet Week
"While there's no formal announcement yet, Google co-founder Larry Page said Monday that the well-known search engine concern would soon let the general public upload self-produced videos to Google's servers, partly in an effort to learn more about how to more efficiently search and display information about video-based data."

Blog Puts the NY Times Under the Microscope

Micro Persuasion
"Wow. This is perhaps the most incredible blog/aggregator that I have ever seen and I have seen lots. The Annotated New York Times is a fascinating new blog that tracks weblog postings citing articles published by The New York Times. The 'blog fragments' are grouped by author, by topic or even by source. Together they form virtual, distributed conversations that span multiple blogs."

RSS Advertising, Coming Fast

CilckZ
"Analysts and pundits have predicted for years RSS use could eclipse the Web or e-mail as the primary method for receiving and viewing content by some consumers. Yet many in the industry haven't paid those predictions much heed. Given RSS' acceleration over the past year or so, those predictions may not be wrong."

Games spend overtakes music, says Nielsen

Reuters.com
"LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Men spend more money on video games than they do on music, research group Nielsen Entertainment said on Thursday, lending credence to a growing belief that video games are displacing other forms of media for the attention of young men.
And video gaming in general is starting to attract an older audience, with nearly a quarter of all gamers over age 40, the agency also said."