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!

Wonderful story in the Observer today about the restored version of “Help!” which is showing tonight on BBC 4. Many years after the film was made (obviously) Dick Lester got a formal letter from MTV declaring him, for the work he did directing both of the early Beatles films, “A Hard Day’s Night” and “Help!”, the father of the modern pop video. His response, apparently, was to IMMEDIATELY write back demanding a blood test! I love the “immediately” …

Am watching the film now with the kids dipping in and out between it and Bebo … Whatever’s happened since - and with Lennon’s murder (a movie about that just hitting the screens in London if you’re feeling an excess of Xmas cheer), Harrison’s death of cancer, and now the whole McCartney divorce thing - there’s been a fair bit to feel dismayed by for a Beatles fan over the decades. Wonderful to get back to unadulterated Fab Four.

I still think the best thing about them was the laughs … I love the story of Lennon, cornered by a US journo: “John! John! Is Ringo Starr the best drummer in the world?” Responded he, without missing the all-important Beat: “He’s not even the best drummer in the Beatles.”

Because I had nothing to say!

Since October 2006 we’ve been working with O2 - more recently their owner, Telefonica really - and Bacardi Global Brands on initiatives that have taken our work and our thinking in very exciting new directions. We’re delving deep in to 21st century media strategy, we developed The TouchStone framework for analyzing and evaluating 360 degree brand communication programmes, and more recently have been exploring advanced mobile marketing strategies.

I feel so privileged - despite the associated stresses - to have the opportunity to do this work. We have a way to go yet before the business is 100% stabilised, but it’s looking OK.

… is that - unless you do a lot of wailing and gnashing and playing golf with CEO’s - it looks cheap and easy. It’s neither.

Tell you what … this blogging business ebbs and flows for me … for 3 months or more I’ve had little that I wanted to communicate outside of the work I do with the very exciting Rights Marketing Company, now well into its second year and very much on a roll.

Couple of things I plan to revisit over the coming weeks in this space … the growing relationship between music and advertising, the issue of media value in the context of a brand new set of consumer experiences, and finally - and perhaps more drily - the fascinating theoretical work we’re doing on the strategic impact for enterprises of the move from value chain to ecosystems.

Advertisers currently fund - one way or another - some form of content and embed their messaging inside or alonsgide. In Media 2.0, advertisers must move on from interruption of experience to enhancement of experience.

Deep in the labs at Rights Marketing we work on what comes next. And the idea we keep coming back to is micro-sponsorship, aka ‘reverse adtech’.

We see a day when advertisers will bid to sponsor the individual entertainment and other mediated experiences of desirable (affluent, commercially attractive) consumers.

It goes like this: the organisers of (say) the webcasting of a music concert offer the sponsorship rights to the usual suspects in media buying. 4 fmcg brands commit to enter the bidding program: Dominos, Coke, T-mobile and Quiksilver. When consumers sign up for the event, brands bid to be the unique sponsor of their experience of the content (and this can be offered to groups of friends - the tribal piece - as well as individuals).

Each brand not only commits to foot the basic bill for the consumer who signs up: they sweeten the bid with brand-exclusive, event-specific enhancements such as discount coupons (via web or mobile) for food and snacks during the event, online and/or mobile services to increase the individual (or especially the tribal) enjoyment of the event (for example rich chat environments where friends can connect and make new friends), or exclusive promotional merchandise (caps, t-shirts, even a branded CD of the concert to your door 24 hours later).

Consider for a second the Return on (yes, not cheap) Investment that derives from the remarkable Return on Attention that micro-sponsorship creates. The brand that wins the bid moves immediately from the usual painful and suspicious hovering around the outskirts of the party (’trendy vicar’, as it’s sometimes cruelly called) to occupy a welcomed and value-adding role not too far from the event core. The opt-in factor is highly positive, and the CRM potential is, for once, both genuine and large. And brand-consumer permissions go sky-high.

I wonder if at least some resolution of the well-documented marketers’ conumdrum (innovation and accountability) may lie in the adoption of this reverse-engineered advertising. We’ll certainly be suggesting it for our clients.

Worth commenting that the BBC is capturing 58% of all online audiences for the World Cup … a big enough number to get me blogging again after an embarrassingly long gap!

…. in London yesterday. What a smart and well-informed - and, critically, intellectually alive character he is! Also fascinating to hear about what he's up to outside his excellent blog.

Key thoughts from Scott Karp on the Reuters issue here.

We’re delighted to announce, further to time spent together at the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad, that Prof Paddy Miller of IESE, the top business school in world (FT, Economist etc) has invited Rights Marketing to assist with the development and delivery of the new Leadership in Media MBA program (NY) and the media component of the core MBA program (Barcelona).

We’re beginning the development process on this today, for launch in both NYC and Barcelona in the fall. A priviledge and a pleasure.

…. after an AMAZING week in Mumbai and Hyderabad with top business school IESE and the marvellous Indian School of Business. I’ll be podcasting on this with Jonathan Lakin my co-founder in Rights Marketing in the next few days, but high points included:

• Flying into Mumbai to see the incredible sprawl that is the city.
• Meeting the IESE and ISB teams and working with them for a week of deep learning and many laughs.
• Visiting with India’s hottest companies - Infosys, Tata Group and many more
• Lectures from some of the brightest minds in Indian commerce and culture.
• Cab rides with lepers banging on the window at traffic lights - makes New York seem … suburban.
• The glorious quality and range of India’s quality newspapers, in particular The Times of India.

So … back in the blog saddle and normal service to be resumed.

Quoted in full.

Watch reconstruction happen in real-time: Digg Spy.

A viscerally powerful demonstration of value shifting to the edge: in this case, outside the boundaries of the firm itself.

A viscerally powerful demonstration of the most important concepts behind 2.0 strategy, and why they fundamentally upend the orthodoxies of 1.0 strategy: without understanding why openness, sharing, transparency, and zero intelligence, are deep sources of economic value creation - not just fuzzy, feelgood notions - Digg Spy, or reconstructors like it, couldn’t even be conceptualized.

Finally, a viscerally powerful demonstration of strategy decay and competence traps - why the media industry is unable to leverage these new economics to build edge competencies: because the assumptions that must be overturned are deeply embedded in their core businesses, strategies - and ways of making of the world.

This is an important post; if you’re a regular reader, I hope you’ll click over, check the link for a while, watch it evolve, then come back here and re-read the post.

New Scientist on those Superbowl ads …

Brain scans of Super bowl viewers suggest that certain commercials more effectively excite the brain’s empathy and reward centres, making them “light up”.

Now, if we can just make the ads more interesting than watching paint dry, we’re home!

Michael and Umair Haque of Bubble Generation examine the state of play and strategic implications of Media 2.0 in the first of a series of podcasts.