Pub stands for “la publicite”, the French word for advertising – rather than the more British “Public House”.
Culture Pub is a TV show about advertising that was broadcast weekly on French channel M6 for almost 20 years. This is actually an impressive amount of longevity for France (yet as a point of comparison, the soap opera General Hospital has apparently been showing in the US since 1963).
Culture Pub was taken off the air in 2005, but is now reborn as a web site which launched a couple of days ago: www.culturepub.fr. It is literally a Youtube for commercials with thousands of spots available – very much the same concept as Firebrand which coincidentally launched yesterday.
The jury is still out since Firebrand is in beta, but my preference right now goes to Culture Pub.
Compared to Firebrand, they seem to have more depth and editorial video content (albeit only in French). Hopefully they will realize the potential benefits of making English language transcripts or subtitles available to reach an international audience.
I am in France for business this week. I attended last night the French Effie Award ceremony that crowns every year the most effective advertising campaigns in several categories.
One of my international clients won this much coveted award and needless to say, I am very proud to be an integral part of this success from New York.
I moved out of France quite a while ago which made it kind of eerie to bump into former colleagues who also attended the event. Congratulations again to Pierre D. and Philippe D. from Rapp Collins and to Francois B. from Eurodisney, if you read these lines!
Since today’s post is about Effies, I would like to share the link to their US case study database. Lots of amazing success stories there… They speak for themselves.
Talking of Honda… I cannot resist the temptation of including the 2002 Accord commercial nicknamed “Cog”. I’m not sure if the debate is settled on whether this was a painstakingly precise real life domino effect or whether it was just the result of some computer graphics wizardy.
Whatever – the resulting visual feast is what matters!
Hot off the press: a quick post to say that Amazon just launched Kindle, a book / magazine / newspaper reader that uses e-ink technology, just like the Sony Reader. Following the launch of movie and DRM-free MP3 downloads, Amazon is aggressively pursuing digital distribution opportunities.
What’s interesting though is that it has wireless capability, not through wi-fi hotspots but through the Sprint EVDO wireless data network. There is no subscription necessary to download content so the deal with Sprint must be about revenue sharing. Mmm… I guess international roaming is not an option then.
At $399 it may be on the expensive side but Amazon is probably only interested in getting the product in the hands of early adopters at this stage.
I realized that I did not mention Yahoo! Kickstart in my last post about social networks.
Yahoo! has had clear success in injecting social components in its offering, most notably through Yahoo! Travel and Yahoo! Answers. Interestingly, the portal did not try to create yet another generic social network and went for a niche approach with Kickstart.
The service aims at establishing bridges between two worlds are not strongly interconnected from a social computing standpoint: the business universe where LinkedIn is the social network of choice, and the academic universe where Facebook established its initial stronghold.
Linkedin offers amongst other things to put job applicants in contact with company insiders that they are connected to, and Kickstart follows in those footsteps. Kickstart is in fact probably closer to Doostang than Linkedin. It inherits a few things from Yahoo! … its enormous traffic, its brand reputation with young adults, and its legitimacy on the job search segment through HotJobs.
There is undoubtedly a need for this service. The HR department of one of my clients recruits a lot of graduates every year and was interested in a similar application as part of the redesign of their web site. In corporate marketing, as the war for talent intensifies, brochures have no longer the same impact as word of mouth and peer conversations – just like in consumer marketing.
The key question for the future of Yahoo! Kickstart is whether Facebook (or an independent third party Facebook developer) will offer a similar service to its fast growing user base. Which in turn brings us to the larger topic of the professional credentials of Facebook – so far, the network has been mainly synonymous with frivolous time-killing activities like games and quizzes.
Can Facebook become a force in business networking? Is an exchange protocol a la OpenSocial the answer? What do you think?
There is certainly what Gartner calls a hype cycle at play with social networks – not just in general, but with each of them individually. Friendster was the first social network to falter into oblivion, and MySpace’s growth has considerably slowed down.
I remember reading a post a long time ago that was comparing social networks to trendy bars and restaurants: the people motivated by exclusivity move on to a new spot as soon as the crowds start to show up in the current one.
Social network fatigue will grow in parallel with, if not faster than the number of solicitations. Like for email newsletters, there is a finite amount of user time and attention available. Each new network brings dilution and accelerates the path to saturation. In that regard, Google’s somewhat ballyhooed launch of OpenSocial is a timely announcement even if it does not address the core issue of proliferation.
Behind the generic term “social networks”, I feel that there is in fact a number of different approaches. Here is my take at a quick and dirty classification of social networks.
1) In the first category (“connection networks”) you can of course find the most popular names, from Myspace and Facebook to Hi5 and Orkut. At the core of those services there is a “connection engine” and initially the main activity of the users is to accumulate contacts. Sharing becomes most gratifying after they reach a certain threshold in terms of network size.
2) Services like Plaxo Pulse or AIM Pages are built on existing connections like email address books or IM buddy lists. They are mainly adding a content sharing layer to communication tools, and that is why I nickname them “communication networks”.
While these first two types are intentionally generic, the other types of social networks are focused on narrower purposes. I would call them “topic networks”, “demographic networks”, and “media networks”.
3) Social networks like last.fm, LinkedIn, Xbox Live, and sermo.com gather users around a specific interest topic – respectively music, business, gaming, and medical research. Sites like Bebo or MySpace still very much reflect their original focus on music, but they have become less specialized over time.
4) Any topic can be discussed on social networs like eons.com (for people past 50 years old) and cafemom.com but membership satisfies specific demographic criteria.
5) Social networks on sites like usatoday.com or ESPN Sports Nation aim at increasing audience engagement, and as such remain secondary to “journalistic” content.
I would love to hear other opinions and comments on this: would you classify social networks differently? Do you see other categories? Can you think of other examples?
Came across this short photo gallery on the Guardian that shows how the iPod evolved over time. What will the iPod look like in 2013?
Mobile phones and MP3 players are probably the most fascinating examples of the pace of technological innovation. The pace may not be that different from that of Moore’s law, which was invariably demonstrated when the computing power of microprocessors doubled every 18 months or so. But just like what the advertising emphasized, it was “(Intel) inside”. Nowadays everyone makes sure that innovation is clearly visible on the outside.
Talking of the Guardian, they launched their US edition – Guardian America – at the end of October. A bold international expansion move at a time when most newspapers are either shrinking or reinventing themselves as multimedia content conglomerates (like the New York Times company).
It is still to early to see if this formal launch helped increase their US reach (currently around 2M monthly visits), but we should revisit this in a few months when audience data becomes available.
Last year Procter & Gamble created some controversy in the online research world. They explained that they got very different results with two identical surveys conducted by the same online research vendor… just a few days apart. This cast some doubt on the credibility of online research, especially given the influence clout of the CPG marketing giant.
In my personal experience, it is definitely possible to have robust online samples that are not too biased. But this comes at an extra price, and will often slightly extend the duration of the data collection phase. This may come in the way of the attractiveness of online market research solutions, whose two main advantages are low cost and fast turnaround.
Many research executives agree that one major issue with online panels are the so-called deceptive or professional respondents. In other words, people who take surveys to earn a few bucks and are giving incorrect or random answers.
As I was working on an online survey last week, I came across an interesting initiative called PureSample that is worth mentioning.
It is easy to detect deceptive respondents, based on inconsistencies or short survey completion times. Puresample identifies their email addresses and allow panel managers to identify and isolate the people who are likely to make a survey inaccurate.
Kind of feels like a spam filter for surveys, doesn’t it?
On a related note about the growing importance of reliable samples, Dynamic Logic – probably the most prominent online advertising research company – launched in August 2007 a separate company called Safecount. They focus exclusively on the recruitment for online advertising surveys.
