by Alastair Little, Senior Digital Communications Manager EMEA, Universal McCann

Subject: You have a new email – somewhere else

Life has changed dramatically over the past few years. I used to drift pleasantly through the day, doing things that I wanted to do and pursuing my own goals. Now my hours are filled for me.

At time of going to press I have 406 unread emails in Hotmail, including one from Mr Wang Chan, an Executive Director of The Bank of China, offering me access to unclaimed funds at his bank, as well as untold numbers of MySpace friend requests from bands I don’t know.

I have 149 unread Facebook messages, which means I’ve had at least 149 emails to my work account telling me that someone has sent me a message on Facebook. Since when did I need an email to tell me I have a new email?

When I do log on to Facebook for a bit of ‘housekeeping’, someone pops up on Facebook Messenger to tell me about their day. This is ironic, since whenever I log on to Windows Live Messenger at work, that is exactly what I end up doing all day.

It’s a good laugh though. Never before have I had such an endless supply of entertainment in my life – nor have I been quite so distracted.

We’re all media owners now

In the US, social networking site MySpace has overtaken Yahoo! as the biggest player in the online market – growth which is directly propelled by the deluge of user-generated content. Media comes from more sources than ever before, a challenging trend for advertisers trying to capture consumers’ attention. Alongside internet usage, 83% of mobile phones in Europe have cameras and 99% of their owners have used that functionality, with a further two-thirds claiming to have sent a picture MMS to friends.(1)

My phone has a 5MP camera and features a 140 MHz processor. It’s hard to believe that the original Nintendo Entertainment System ran on just over 5 MHz of power. As the march of Moore’s Law continues, content creating hardware (and software) will become more accessible, more powerful and more empowering. GarageBand, Windows Movie Maker and iPhoto are all bundled with hardware; I can now get a version of Pro Tools, the music industry’s standard studio workstation, for about £300 – which is incredibly powerful software. The net result of this (no pun intended) is that big media companies have experienced an explosion of potential competitors. As have advertisers.

The digital media landscape, particularly where it’s social (most of it), has
become democratic: social networks and companies like Google (see the Android Developer Challenge) are encouraging a barrage of contributions to the internet through open application programming interfaces (APIs); Twitter was created in 24 hours using Ruby on Rails and is now a multimillion dollar business; anyone can create a fully functioning blog for free in minutes using services like Blogger and Wordpress.

In 1993, the Chairman & CEO of Bell Atlantic said, “The time is not far off when you will be answering your television set and watching your telephone.”2 What sounds like a futuristic statement to some has become a reality for users of the iPhone and other such handsets. Their phone usage provides an early snapshot of mass consumer behaviour in the future, over-indexing as they do against sophisticated computing habits. Already in Japan, only 24% of mobile phone usage is attributed to calls and there are only three markets left in the world where that figure is north of 60%: Thailand, Taiwan and the US. 3



As for answering your TV, Yahoo! and Intel have announced their plans to develop widgets for televisions. Anything that can be digitized will be widgetized (sorry), allowing further sharing and distribution of multimedia content.

As Wi-Fi becomes ubiquitous, and even more so when WiMAX becomes economically viable, we will see whole counties (possibly the whole of the UK) become wirelessly enabled. It’s never been as easy to contribute to the media landscape – and more access points and platforms, coupled with higher data transfer speeds across all formats, will propel this trend of consumer participation in the media.

Talk to the hand

Google says there is roughly 14 hours of video uploaded onto YouTube every single minute, which is a staggering statistic. I prefer the perspective of La Times blogger David Sarno (a.k.a. Web Scout), who in February 2008 wrote:

“Web Scout’s First Law of Internet Culture: 99% of everything is crap… YouTube has nearly 70,000,000 videos, so many of which are terrible that you wouldn’t be mathematically remiss by rounding its crap fraction up to 100%.”(4)

Well put sir. But even 0.01% of 70 million still leaves 7,000 videos for my friends to enjoy and share with me as links, emails, messages, etc. Add that to the stuff I want to consume of my own volition – music, podcasts, BBC iPlayer, GTA IV, beer, steak and chips – and suddenly it’s understandable that the last thing on earth I have time for is an unnecessary pop-up advert. If I wasn’t looking for you or your product, the least you can do is give me something special enough to be worth talking about down the pub.

To grab people’s attention is harder than ever. Hardly anyone goes to brand websites because there are too many better things to do and only so many hours in the day. How many brand pages on social networking sites are out there with less than 200 ‘fans’?

Even if you reach out to consumers, they can close their browser, ignore your ad or better still blog about how annoying you are to the hundreds of people in their social network or subscription base. It’s all on the consumer’s terms now. This is indicative of the on-demand behaviour that is becoming the norm across all media channels (see Sky+ and BBC Radio 1 podcasts for two examples), which is what makes understanding social media so important.

Brands need to start leveraging their relationships and resources to bring truly awe-inspiring experiences, opportunities and services to their desired audience.

Case study: Intel Powers Music

In H2 2007, Intel wanted to engage music creators and convey the benefits of multi-core processing. The brand promise was ‘Multiply Your Music’, so Universal McCann created a pan-European MySpace music programme that delivered this on two levels.

MySpace’s calling card since inception was the 4-track music player, which bands would install to showcase their demos. In delivering the brand promise, Intel launched the official 5-track music player, literally allowing bands to ‘multiply’ their music on the social network. While this exclusive sponsorship undoubtedly brought value to the audience, it was deemed that something more would be needed to drive excitement and allow the brand to spend time with its consumers.

In solving this problem Intel launched the Supergroup initiative, asking the MySpace audience in six European markets to vote for their favourite singer, guitarist, bassist and drummer from anywhere in the world, to form one MySpace Supergroup. 6 million profile views, 61,000 friends and over 25,000 artist submissions later, the winning band members were chosen.

Those winners were then flown to London for four days, rehearsing in Bush Studios in Shepherd’s Bush, before going to Universal Music to record a single in their studios, which is out now on iTunes and all major digital music stores. The artwork and band name were also chosen by the MySpace community, who were handed full control of the project.

In addition to recording a single for the world’s largest record label, we
arranged for the winners to each have a one-on-one interview with Louis Bloom – a top A&R executive at Island Records and 2007’s second most successful A&R man in the world according to www.HitQuarters.net (to put that in perspective, Simon Cowell was ranked number eight). Louis listened to their demos and gave them advice on how to further their careers, a truly invaluable experience for any aspiring musician.

A Dynamic Logic study showed that all of this excitement, coupled with great content from Intel on how to get the most out of home studio recording, yielded massive spikes in brand affinity metrics and purchase intent across the hundreds of thousands of people that visited the Intel MySpace page.

Moving forward

So who’s doing what, and why is it significant? Amazon and Play.com have shown us that user reviews and lists are now so much more powerful than the product write-up. Brands such as McDonalds, Dell and Cancer Research UK all have consumer feedback forums and blogs allowing people to interact directly. Even Google, Yahoo! and Facebook all have company blogs that allow them to communicate instantly with their everexpanding audiences. In a sense, this means going back to basics - in the absence of call-centre staff consumers still want to be able to talk to someone, to voice their concerns and even give credit where credit is due, rather than being directed to a set of frustrating online FAQs.

We’ve always consumed media socially but it’s becoming far more automated. In the short term, our web activity is going to get more communal. Services like OpenSocial, Facebook Connect and Microsoft Live ID are battling it out to become a singular log-in point for users across the web.

If one becomes the standard, we’ll see many websites sign up to the service so they can capitalise on registration details and behavioural activity by increasing the relevancy of their advertising (and charging media buyers a premium in the process). This also involves displaying search results and other content based on our ‘social graphs’, which means what our social network friends have clicked on will be deemed more relevant.

Consider Microsoft’s deal to integrate Live Search within Facebook. This will have a profound effect on the way search is displayed to users, as the
social graph maps over mathematical algorithms.

In the longer term, we will see many more examples of this to come,
across a multitude of media platforms. Intel and Yahoo!’s TV widgets are
just the start.

Social media in action

Sex and the City – Carrie’s Mac Book campaign (New Media Maze)

New Media Maze developed a campaign for the Sex and the City movie - ‘Carrie’s Mac Book’ Users were given ‘faked’ access to Carrie’s macbook using a flash interface. Challenges were set and completed through a series of user participated chats with Carrie’s friends, and users were then rewarded with access to exclusive Sex and the City content.

Next page

(1) ‘Any Time, Any Place: Understanding The Connected Generation’ (Universal McCann)
(2) ‘A Baby Bell Primed For The Big Fight’, Edmund L. Andrews (The
New York Times)
(3) ‘Any Time, Any Place: Understanding The Connected Generation’
(Universal McCann)
(4) 5 Source: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/webscout/2008/02/facebook-graffi.html