April 2008 Archives

Phew!

This is my chosen topic for a talk at Internet World this afternoon - what was I thinking!

Anyway, I'm going to turn my talk into a blog entry just to get my thoughts in order... here goes.

The starting point for this came from a piece of academic research I stumbled upon - it's a paper on 'Narrative Processing: Building Consumer Connections to Brands' by Jennifer Escalas at the University of Arizona.

To quote from the abstract:

"Narrative processing creates or enhances self-brand connections (SBC) because people generally interpret the meaning of their experiences by fitting them into a story. Similarly, in response to an ad that tells a story, narrative processing may create a link between a brand and the self when consumers attempt to map incoming narrative information onto stories in memory. Our approach rests on the notion that a brand becomes more meaningful the more closely it is linked to the self. We conceptualize this linkage at an aggregate level in terms of SBCs, that is, the extent to which consumers have incorporated the brand into their self-concepts. The results of an experiment show that narrative processing in response to a narratively structured ad is positively related to SBCs, which in turn have a positive relation with brand attitudes and behavioral intentions."

This feels pretty fair to me. When we engage with a story, we subconsciously put ourselves into the story: if the story involves a brand, we imagine ourselves engaging with the brand.

However - and here comes a pretty broad brush statement - whilst above the line advertising intuitively understands this, I wonder whether digital agencies really focus enough on narrative structures.

Here's a classic commercial for Hamlet cigars which I still find funny no matter how many times I've seen it. And yet it isn't just humour for humour's sake - the payoff is that Hamlet makes the frustrations of everyday life somehow a little more bearable.

 Set against this, an awful lot of digital advertising is really very utilitarian.

This banner for airport parking is actually not exceptionally bad - it's just representative of the kind of droning offer-based creative that we see online all the time.

 OK, that isn't really a fair fight!  Of course there are some great examples of narratives appearing online.  For instance, the About Us page on the Innocent site tells the familiar story of how Innocent was founded:

"In the summer of 1998 when we had developed our first smoothie recipes but were still nervous about giving up our proper jobs, we bought £500 worth of fruit, turned it into smoothies and sold them from a stall at a little music festival in London. We put up a big sign saying 'Do you think we should give up our jobs to make these smoothies?' and put out a bin saying 'YES' and a bin saying 'NO' and asked people to put the empty bottle in the right bin. At the end of the weekend the 'YES' bin was full so we went in the next day and resigned."

Great stuff! 

Stories are particularly important online because we know that people have a myriad of ways to pass on good content to their friends: through blogs, email, social networking sites, user reviews, forums and chat.

So the viral impact of the web is one key factor.  Another is the amazing rise in broadband access speeds, which have on average trebled in the UK over the past two years.

That makes video content an increasingly important part of the mix.  But that doesn't mean that the web will become a channel for 30 second commercials.  In fact there are some fascinating new formats developing that could never have evolved in the more rigid environment of TV.

Take for example, the bizarre case of 'Cheddarvision' - a 24 hour live webcam pointed at, you've guessed it, a cheese.  Cheddarvision, which attracted 1.7 million viewers, has now helpfully compressed 9 months of video into a 60 second film on YouTube.

 

Even the dullest of marketing devices, the product demonstration, can work spectacularly well online, as the brilliant series of videos for Blendtec proves.

At time of writing, this particular film has had 2.7 million views on YouTube.

 

That's great, but I'm a bit worried by the fact that both these examples are coming from clients rather than agencies.  Of course, everyone can have a good idea, but the trouble is that when agencies get involved in this space, the results sometimes backfire spectacularly.

The Cillit Bang incident, where a PR agency writing as the brand spokesman Barry Scott added a comment to a blog written by Tom Coates is still rippling around the Internet.  This all happened two and a half years ago, and the Guardian wrote a story on it at the time: "Cleaner caught playing dirty on the net".  And all these months later, the Guardian story is still ranking on the first page of Google results for searches on the Cillit Bang brand - and the Wikipedia entry for Cillit Bang retells the story. 

I'm worried that many digital agencies are stuck into a direct response, results driven mentality and simply aren't thinking about creating strong narratives that will build brands.  I saw a presentation from a major online retailer where they described the steps in the life-stage strategy they followed as:

1) Relationship starts

2) Honeymoon period

3) Ongoing relationship

4) Frustration

5) Disillusionment

6) Abandonment

Of course, this describes a classic story arc, which makes me wonder whether email couldn't be used within part of a narrative structure.  Years ago, this was exactly the pretext of the interactive drama Online Caroline, where emails from the lead character knitted together short video episodes.

Online Caroline - which was created by XPT and bought by Freeserve - is the direct precursor of the fascinating soap operas being developed by Bebo.

These kicked off with Kate Modern - which was created by the team behind the YouTube hit lonelygirl15.

Gap Year is currently in development, and will be a fantastically ambitious project - especially since the characters are real people who will be filming themselves as they play within a loosely plotted narrative as they travel around the world. 

And my current favourite is Sofia's Diary (not that I'm especially the target audience!)  With its snappy 3 minute webisode format and integrated pre-roll advertising, I think that Bebo has really stumbled upon a format that will work incredibly well online.  It's well worth checking out an episode or two.

So where is this all going.  I think that stories and brands are natural bed-fellows and have been for a long time.  I think that digital can be an incredibly exciting environment to deliver stories and see their impact really multiply.  And sadly, I don't see agencies making a lot of the running here, as opposed to clients and media owners.

Following on from my last post about Firefox 3's excellent location bar functionality, I had a quick look at some stats on browser usage across Europe.

Sadly for my argument, it turns out that Firefox has a pretty low penetration into the UK market compared with the rest of Europe.

Here's a great map from Xitimonitor of Firefox penetration into Europe as of December 2007.  (Actually the UK isn't quite the lowest - the Netherlands and the Ukraine are a tiny bit lower.)

Not sure why this should be the case - innate conservatism perhaps.  Interesting to see whether Firefox 3 will change this.

Currently in beta, Firefox 3 has introduced some fab new technology to the browser location bar.

Users can perform a keyword search through their entire web history from within the location bar.  This makes for a fast and convenient way to navigate back to pages that have previously been visited.

The technology goes way beyond auto-complete by offering a keyword search of URLs, page titles and tags from previously visited pages.  Results are ordered by 'frecency' - a combination of how recently and frequently you have visited a page (with an adaptive learning algorithm further tuning results for relevancy).

For example, let's say that you have been browsing through Tesco Direct and found a Whirlpool washing machine that you like.

You decide to check back with your partner before making the purchase. 

Autocomplete on the URL isn't too helpful... you'd have to know that the URL http://direct.tesco.com/q/R.200-9621.aspx related to your chosen washing machine.

But type 'Tesco Whirlpool' into the browser and Firefox locates the page you want...

Normally this is the kind of heavy-lifting job that people would have taken to a search engine.

Last year, Atlas published an analysis on 250,000 clicks on paid search ads on Google Adwords, Yahoo! and MSN.  The report, 'Paying for Navigational Search', showed that 36.9% of clicks were searches on brand terms by repeat visitors to a website.

The big brands moaning about Google's relaxation of brand protection rules in the UK should be praying that Firefox 3 really takes off - the potential is here for companies to get chunks of relevant traffic direct from the browser, just as nature intended!

Facebook is rolling out their new Chat client today - surely a potential blight on global productivity if this office is anything to go by.  And it's very hot news on Twitter, judging by this graph from the very wonderful Twist.

It will be interesting to compare this data with Google Trends. I don't expect we'll see quite such a jump on Google Trends as that is measuring what people are searching for, whereas Twist is looking at what people are talking about.

Will Facebook Chat work?  I don't think it can ever be as omni-present as MSN Messenger - it just feels a bit too much like hard work to me to have to go to Facebook, check which friends are online, etc, etc.

Our friends at Insiders View have an interesting post about Google's 'previous query technique'.

This has been in varying degrees of beta testing for at least six months, but now seems to be happening a lot - particularly around high cost financial services terms.

What happens is that Google will take a user's previous query into account when serving results for a search.

So here's an example.  My first search was for 'car insurance' and brought up the usual suspects.  I then followed up with a search on 'Paris'.

Here's the resulting page:


To be honest, I think that this is a bit of a mess from a user's point of view.  The top three sponsored links relate to car insurance, but everything else on the page relates to Paris.

Are all these links relevant to the search query?  Not really. 

Of course, Google would argue that the links are relevant to the searcher, who has indicated an interest in car insurance and in Paris. 

But what's really going on here is that there is a limited amount of good financial services inventory, so Google is 'spreading' the search results into other pages.  It's exactly like the way that retargeting on some portals and networks operates, where someone who has checked on loans offers can be shown a loans ad whilst they check their horoscope.

And as a comment on the Insiders View blog points out, this is yet another attempt by Google to grub in a little more cash.  So if you reverse the searches, and look at 'Paris' and then 'Car Insurance', there are no listings at all relating to Paris, France or anything other than car insurance.  Google's results are not following relevance, they are following the money!

Google's first quarter results were spectacularly good and certainly blew away any thoughts of faltering performance from our favourite search monopoly.

Deep in the numbers is the performance of Google UK. 

"Revenues from the United Kingdom totaled $803 million, representing 15% of revenue in the first quarter of 2008, compared to 16% in the first quarter of 2007 and 14% in the fourth quarter of 2007."

So year on year share of revenues from the UK have dropped by 1%.  But that reflects greater earnings growth in other less mature markets rather than any inherent weakness in the UK.

A year ago, Google's Q1 2007 results showed UK revenues of $578 million.  My maths is a bit shaky, but that looks like a fairly healthy rise of around 40% year on year.  An ordinary company would be pretty happy with that, although it's a little less than the global increase in revenues of 42%.  Over the past 12 months sterling has appreciated a little (around 1%) against the dollar, which takes a tiny bit of shine off the numbers, but they still look very healthy.

All the same, Google seems determined to extract as much revenue as possible from paid search in the UK.  Hence the impending change to bidding on trademarks, which is likely to drive up bid prices on brand terms for most large companies.

Last August we also saw some changes to the top ad placement formula on Adwords.  Instead of looking at actual CPC when calculating the cost of a top ad placement, Google now looks at the maximum CPC that an advertiser is willing to pay.  This will add to the pain of brand owners who will naturally be keen to keep their own brands at the top of the paid search listings.

Finally there is a slow drip of changes to what Google seems to regard as legitimate SEO techniques - a post on seobook (Google Thinks YOU are a Black Hat SEO.  Should You Trust Them?) sums up the current state of play very nicely.  It might be a cynical way to look at the market, but it looks as though Google is saying that if you can afford to do SEO on any scale, you should be pushing your budget into Google Adwords.

Google enjoys an incredible market share in the UK and all the signs are that it plans to maintain strong revenue growth off its monopoly position.  And no one would bet against them achieving that!

Forget flying penguins, the start of April also sees the launch of an exciting new banner advertising concept - TrustBanners.  TrustBanners come with a simply amazing offer - Guaranteed Brand Loyalty Advertising.

I've certainly been eating a lot more fruit than normal today!