The Rights Marketing Company’s blog

Delighted that a recent metaphor developed in our TouchStone framework development work with Bacardi Global Brands’ Digital and Insight and Planning teams, is gathering currency amongst both friends and colleagues …

If you watch this and then this first …

20th century media was about targeting and hitting consumers with the same message repeatedly - and repeatably. All the energy was provided by the planning and buying investment of the brand. We can also call this MacroMedia. This is where the bowling analogy seems to explain the dynamic neatly … whereas …

In the 21st century, we score highest - as per the pinball analogy - when we get the ball (the brand) into the high-scoring bumper zone at the top of the table. This is relatively out of control, serendipitous, and the only control we have is the feeble flippers at the bottom of the board. And we use those only to try to get the ball back up those riotous bumpers - just like tribes of networked consumers, who when they take on a piece of media or an idea and start kicking it about, brand awareness and often equity explode upwards. We also call this MicroMedia.

Key takeaway? The energy in the second model - the pinball machine - is primarily owned by the consumer tribes. Excessive brand energy? Well, neatly, it just tilts the whole machine and game over.

I love this job sometimes!

Key thoughts from Scott Karp on the Reuters issue here.

Interesting short piece from BusinessWeek:

It appears that the people who visit a site through a search engine or a link are a different bunch than those who subscribe through an RSS feed. The people who go to the site through a browser might be shopping around for a wireless device so they would respond to an ad for wireless gadgets. But someone who subscribes a feed already has a BlackBerry and the gear that goes with it. An ad encouraging them to buy a BlackBerry or even to dump the device for a Treo wouldn’t work.

Great little idea this - check it out.

This from Dion Hinchcliffe expains a lot if you’re looking to understand the spirit of Web 2.0:

2.63 new mashups a day.  That’s what John Musser’s terrific new Mashup Feed site says is current the creation rate.  If that rate flattens out today, which isn’t likely, that’s over 960 new mashups every year.  Mashups, composite web applications partially constructed from the services and content from other web sites, are taking off with an amazing speed.  Yet they are a relatively new phenomenon in terms of being this widespread and pervasive.  All this even though mashups, like blogs and wikis, were actually possible from the creation date of the first forms-capable browser.  So why the sudden widespread interest?

From The Deal:

According to a New York Post report, Google Inc. is in talks with Napster to either buy the online music service outright, or form some sort of partnership to offer a Google music service. Let’s ignore that both sides have denied the rumors for a second and take a look at what this could mean.

Surely a smart move:

The firm will sell movies and TV shows over the internet in Germany, Austria and Switzerland from March. Its In2Movies service will use the same file-sharing technology that has led to an increase in movie piracy. Warner Bros did not reveal price details but said it planned to widen its international use of P2P networks.

…. not the usual kind, where rage, frustration and bewilderment send me home shattered and fixed in fight, flight or weep mode … no ….

I was wearily gazing at the (new) plasma on-bus TV on the Number 18 to Chalk Farm this morning when I noticed a “25% off sale” ad for an Apple vendor, which caught my attention momentarily. What woke me up (activated my P300 waves …) was the fact the the store was right on (or very close to …) the route of the 18 bus. Contextual, behavioural? Interesting.

What changes when The G-men go fluffy?

Google AdSense is moving beyond the traditional text and graphical advertising to rich media, including interstitials, expanding ads and floating ads. AdSense began contacting publishers last week to be involved in the rich media limited beta test.

From Search Engine Watch:

A new free service from multimedia search engine TVEyes allows a searcher to keyword search each and every word spoken during tv news segment from well-known news organizations. TVEyes is utilzing voice recognition technology to create a “Spoken Word Index” that makes these programs keyword searchable.

From Adrants:

The madly successful video podcast Rocketboom, which garners 130,000 downloads per day, has decided to accept advertising and will do so by auctioning off ad time on eBay. Rocketboom, produced by Andrew Baron and anchored by Amanda Congdon, will require the winning bidder to relinquish creative control and allow Baron and Congdon to create the ad.

From CNET:

Tech takes the spotlight at the high-profile Sundance Film Festival, as moviemakers grapple with online releases and who’ll watch video on a cell phone.

Good summary from the excellent Publishing 2.0 blog:

The news that Google is testing rich media supports the view that traditional brand advertising is not about to go away. Having wrung every penny from smaller advertisers with more transactional businesses — which are the ones that work best with text ads — Google is aiming now at the BIG advertisers who have BIG brands and need rich media to grow, manage, and maintain their brands.

Ning may be on the way out … from TechCrunch:

The idea of Ning, which launched in October 2005, is brilliant. Let people easily create social applications tailored with difference web services. Allow others to clone those applications and take the code from them directly into whatever they are building instead of building from scratch. Watch everything evolve as better and better stuff gets built, which in turn is used to build even better stuff. Ning leverages the platform by aggregating the applications and selling advertising and premium tools/features.

… by Richard Macmanus in handy ZDnet piece.

A lot of the features and functionality of so-called Web 2.0 sites are now common elements in most current web apps and sites. It’s really gone beyond what was labelled ‘Web 2.0′ last year, because so many mainstream websites are now using these elements. It’s no longer a niche trend. For your reference here is a summary of some of the popular elements in use by modern web sites and services:

… starts today. I’ll be at the Midem music convention in Cannes (first time in 15 years …) both promoting Rights Marketing and blogging about the things I learn that may be of Media 2.0 relevance.

Pleased and proud to announce the formation and development, starting today 19/1/2006, of the London and San Francisco-based Media 2.0 Workgroup. Rights Marketing will be heading the early stages of the initiative - on which I’ll be writing more after coming back from Midem in Cannes next week - but so far we have (commercially neutral …) support and commitment from key media folks at both Microsoft UK and BT. Our friend and associate Umair Haque will be holding the fort out of the West Coast.

We’re planning a soft public launch on March 2nd 2006 at the “Understanding Media 2.0″ event we’re co-hosting with Microsoft’s UK media team in London.

More soon … M2WG membership will be by invitation, please get in touch if you’re interested.

From Michael Parekh, a neat look at the impact of small-screen video on mid-screen revenues:

Small screens are already being viewed by marketers as potentially attractive for traditional  video advertising, as this timely New York Times article yesterday discusses in detail (illustration by the New York Times).

If the connection holds with additional data from the networks on their iTunes “experiment” in the coming weeks, we may see a sea-change in how traditional video CONTENT PROVIDERS view video over the Internet delivered to small screens, be they on iPods, cell phones, PDAs, small laptops and other devices.  These devices may become the new “Digital Water Coolers“, around which people spread word-of-mouth opinions on video content.

Instead of content providers looking at these devices as additional points to SELL their content, they may be viewed in SOME CASES as additional points to MARKET and PROMOTE their content, potentially beyond their core audiences.

Now with pics … over 40mb though …

I introduce the series, look at Return on Attention and explore attention-based media strategy in greater detail.

MP3 File

I look at the issue of Return on Attention and explore attention-based media strategy in detail in this first - slightly clumsy but hey … - effort. The RSS feed is here.

This is big, courtesy as so often of Steve Rubel.

From Don Dodge, a useful piece that sets the scene for and introduces MS’s big bigger biggest ad plays:

The search business is all about selling advertisements…targeted advertisements. People hate traditional advertising because it is obnoxious and irrelevant. When ads are targeted to what we are interested in…they are actually useful, helpful, and educational. The better the targeting, the better the return for advertisers, and the more that users actually “like” the ads and click on them. Everyone wins.

… from Michael Parekh: