Tag Archives: digital media

May 16, 2012 · 8:45 am

Fadbook?

One of the themes we touch upon here is the repeating nature of events.  Or as Peter Allen put it, everything old is new again (so much so that Barenaked Ladieswrote a song by the same name).

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Today’s meditation on this concerns Facebook, or rather an interesting bit of research that came out from the AP and CNBC concerning Facebook’s future.  They conducted the poll in anticipation of Facebook going public and my immediate reaction was AOL‘s trajectory morphing to MySpace‘s morphing to…???   The AP piece summed it up with this question:

Is Facebook A Fad?

You’re laughing?  46% of the poll respondents believe Facebook  will fade away as new companies come along, and it’s not just the old farts – younger adults are no more apt than their older counterparts to expect Facebook’s long-term success; 51 percent think it will fade.

For those of us who have been in digital since the start of the commercial era, it’s not a weird question.  Fifteen years ago, one would have asked the same of AOL and could not have imagined that it would pretty much be a blip.  The rise and fall of MySpace is much more recent but illustrative.  So quit your laughing and think about how the nature of the beast is changing.  Facebook is going from a company built to attract and service folks like you and me to a company that’s built to attract and service marketers.  That’s not necessarily a bad thing except that Facebook seem to be bad at it.

You might have read that General Motors is pulling its advertising from Facebook.  That’s a $10 million deal — not massive in terms of value — but very embarrassing for the social network because apparently it was too hard for GM to quantify their ROI.  The poll data supports that thinking – 57% of users say they never click on ads or sponsored content, while 26 percent “hardly ever” click on them.

Like AOL long ago, there are some other underlying factors that might portend bad things.

  • Just 13 percent say they trust Facebook completely or a lot to keep their personal information private.
  • A large majority (59 percent) say they have little or no faith in the company to protect their privacy.
  • Even among the site’s most frequent users — those who use it multiple times a day —half say they would not feel safe making purchases through the site.

There’s another great analysis from Forrester here and I’m sure more will be written as Facebook’s IPO happens later this week.  So is Facebook a fad?  I’ll let you respond via the comments, but my thinking is that while “fad” might not be the right term, it’s definitely not invulnerable.  Given the underlying concerns from users and marketers, someone ought to spend an hour reviewing the history of AOL and recall that MySpace went from “the most popular site in the US” in 2006 to losing half its traffic between 2009 and 2010.  What’s your thinking?

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May 10, 2012 · 8:58 am

More News From The Digital Divide

Another week, another study on how marketers are trying to keep pace with the changes in consumer media behavior.  This one comes from PulsePoint, a digital ad tech company, and finds that the same issues others have discovered over the last few years remain unsolved for the most part.  You can download a copy of the study here.  I think this quote sums up the key finding:

According to PulsePoint CMO Rose Ann Haran, “Consumers are moving freely across channels and devices, interacting with brands and content in real-time.  The digital industry is not flowing as easily with this liquid audience. Channel-centric technologies and processes are causing a divide between our marketing capabilities and our ability to truly engage the consumer in a real-time interactive manner.”

In other words, consumers are “fluid” and “channel-agnostic,” while the current state of digital marketing practices designed to reach them can be best described as being too “channel-centric.” It goes on to cite “overwhelming complexity” and a “lack of unified measurement” as key challenges in preventing the industry from being properly aligned with the consumer, and those challenges make it difficult to track consumers across channels.

My first reaction was “oh, boo hoo.”  Yes, those pesky consumers keep changing their habits and the ongoing game of attention hide-and-seek can be really frustrating.  But look at the opportunities that game has fostered, both in terms of new businesses that have emerged as well as new ways to engage consumers.  What this is really about is marketers’ inability to change their own business methods and models as rapidly as required.  Planning and buying are “silo-ed” in the words of the study.  There is a whiff of turf wars throughout, in my opinion – departments within agencies, agencies vs. one another, creative v. media – you know the drill.  Maybe you even live it!

Then there’s this: “Other factors driving the divide include a misalignment of priorities the industry sees as important to improving their digital marketing practices.”  It’s nice that research such as this is conducted regularly.  It’s an excellent mirror to those of us who are charged with staying in touch with and engaging consumers.  Now, let’s commit to doing something about it so the divide between marketing and those it’s meant to reach closes a lot more rapidly.

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April 30, 2012 · 10:41 am

10 Years After

I was thinking over the weekend about what a very different place the world is going to be from a technical and media perspective in just a few years.  Of course, if you take a few minutes to think back and recall how the world was in 2002, just a decade ago, you’d be missing YouTube, iPhones, Facebook, Twitter, and hybrid cars.  Every one of those things is a daily part of my life and probably yours as well.

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What got me thinking about this was this:

New research from Leichtman Research Group finds that 38% of all U.S. households have at least one television set connected to the internet via a video game system, a Blu-ray player, an Apple TV, a Roku set-top box and/or the TV set itself. This number is up from 30% last year, and 24% from two years ago. Game consoles are the key devices within this category, as 28% of all households have a video game system connected to the web.

I spend some time each week watching Hulu+, Netflix, YouTube, and other services through my Xbox.  That time spent is not incremental to normal TV viewing – it’s content I find more interesting than what’s available.  That behavior ties in with the research:

  • 13% of Netflix subscribers would consider reducing spending on their multichannel video service because of Netflix, down from 21% last year.
  • 16% of all U.S. adults watch full-length TV shows online at least weekly, up from 12% last year.
  • 19% of mobile phone owners watch video on their phones on a weekly basis; while 9% of all U.S. adults watch video on an iPad/tablet.

So I sort of had this flash forward.  If traditional cable boxes become anachronisms, what else goes with them?  I think desktop computers will be history soon, as tablets and other mobile devices access cloud-based services and data.  Even though I have many computers in my home, I spend nearly all my time on a laptop and could very easily transition to a tablet with a keyboard.  Skype and Google Voice could replace my landline and just may shortly.  I’m sure you can add a few legacy technologies/services that need either to pivot or die.

In only 10 years, a lot of our behavior has been changed by a few services and technologies.  In another 10, it will all be different again.  Are you ready?  Is your business?

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