Diet Coke Films goes ABC Sunday Arts

So I promised I would do a follow up on the Diet Coke Films site to see how they had progressed and to be honest if I hadn't said I would do this chances are I would have never revisited the site (it doesn't quite make it to my top 10 favourite web pages).

Diet Coke know their customer pretty well and at the risk of pigeon holing them its 30+ females working in a corporate environment, so it makes me wonder why today's movie got a look in. "Wally the Rainbow Serpent" is a well produced movie don't get me wrong, but I'm not sure that it really suits Diet Cokes core demographic more suited to a 3min break between Robert Hughes review of 20th century American sculptors and a piece on the Western Australia Ballet Company on ABC's Sunday afternoon programming. According to the site this is the second time Diet Coke have run the film (for those who missed it the first time) and has a total 1572 views, a little short of the 162,228 views of a cat rubbing its face on youtube.

So it seems as though the site isn't doing as well as they would have hoped. Hats off to coke for trying the idea, but I get the feeling that they would have been better off employing some true online video content consumers to consult on the project rather than going down the slick marketing path. Deciding to sacrifice usability for the sake of pretty backgrounds and flash animations are unacceptable in my opinion. Youtube is a great site cause its simple and the videos load quickly (and really that's why I'm there to watch the videos) where as the coke site makes me wait for ages for the video to load.. not cool.

Is facebook really a Malcolm Gladwell experiment?

So Gladwell has this bit in his book the tipping point where he talking about how your circle of friends is probably more like a pyramid thanks to the personality types he calls "connectors". A connectors is that person who brings people together, the girl at the party who says "oh you have to come meet my friend...", I'm sure you know the person I am talking about. From a marketing point of view connectors also serve a integral purpose of evangelising your business to others always introducing people to your products and services. If you want a better explanation, chapter 2 of The Tipping Point can sort you out.

So Facebook has the "how did you meet" function that I find to be a pretty interesting read. For the most people are linked by "they went to school together" or "they met randomly" but every so often when looking down a list of someones friends you find the recuring message "they met though [mutual friend]". This mutial friend is a connector, the more times they appear in this field the better connector they are. As much as I hate marketers invading social networking sites trying to turn the thing into an Amway-esque sales loop, I can certainly see the value that can be gained by marketers speaking directly to these people.

So someday someone will find a way to view the people on facebook who top the charts in the "they met through [mutual friend]" and marketers will realise they can just focus on these individuals and stop wasting money pitching their brand message to someone that will tell no one.

Fragmentation and Advertising Value

So I listened to the Cameron Reilly interview with Geoffrey Bowll, Managing Director of Melbourne based ad agency Starship today. Excellent interview! Two intelligent guys, not afraid to call a spade a shovel. Definitely give it a listen. And thanks to Jake to bringing it to our attention :)
One thing Geoffrey Bowll was talking about in the podcast was, with the decline in TV audiences and increasing media and audience fragmentation, how this could be used by advertisers and marketers to their advantage.

Consider a simple (crude example). Suppose a clothing manufacturer has two choices to advertise their products; TV ads and Podcast sponsorship.

TV ads: cost of ad airtime = $20,000 for 1,000,000 views or eyeballs.
So, disregarding notions of brand awareness and loyalty etc, for this ad to just break-even (at an industry standard 10% EBIT return on Sales) it would require $200,000 worth of sales. If we assumed each purchase for a person was approx. $50, that would be 4000 customers, from that one ad, that would need to be compelled to purchase the product to achieve an acceptable ROI on the advertising expense.
To break-even:
TV ad rate of return per set of eyeballs is $0.2 (each person who sees the ad needs to spend approx 20 cents on your product to break-even)
TV ad conversion rate needs to be 0.4%, which is the percent of people who saw the ad that need to buy the product to break-even, (given an average purchase price of $50 per person).

Podcast sponsorship: Now let’s consider the alternative. Suppose there was a podcast dedicated to fashion. This podcast has a modest audience of about 30,000 listeners. Rremember people who are listening to a fashion dedicated podcast are most likely fashion enthusiast, industry people and early adopters - a marketer’s wetdream.
Ok, so the audience is small but the cost of the sponsorship will be small also. Let’s say the cost of sponsorship is $1000 per podcast episode (this is an upper range estimate - the rate for most popular podcast is $25 per thousand listeners / downloader’s).
To break-even the podcast ad would need to generate $10,000 worth of sales. This gives us the following to break-even figures:
Podcast ad rate of return per set of eyeballs is $0.33
Podcast ad conversion rate needs to be 0.67%

If you are aiming to get 4 people out of every 1000 people who see your TV ad to purchase your product (with the likely TV audience a scattered demographic), getting 7 out of every 1000 people who hear you podcast ad, with an audience that you know is interested in a similar topic, likes to support the "free podcast” they are receiving and are generally early adopters, seems like a walk in the park.

My advice to anyone considering moving from traditional media advertising to new alternatives: Give it a try on a small scale. Build in tools and applications that enable you to track results. The small cost of new media makes it a small risk in which you can easily track the results.

And for those that think fragmentation and the shift from traditional media is not happening, check this article on Afterworld. Afterworld is the first television series to be made available on mobile phones and the web simultaneously, created by three-time Emmy-nominated producer Stan Rogow.

Big Kevin07

I plan on two posts today. That’s right, you heard me, two post on the same day. Value for money blog today. ...unprecedented on this blog.

1. Kevin07

I have mentioned before the ways that Australians are utilising new media and social networks for the upcoming federal election (in particular with Myspace Impact - see here). Now Kev (no Rudd anymore) has his own very web2.0'ie' site, Kevin07, that brings all his online efforts together.

It’s a nice little site, feels more like a fan site than a party site, and does a good job at showing the personal side of all this politicking. Check out some cool blogs that talk about it in a little more detail (and some would argue credible analysis than I have here :))
Social Media in Australian
Laurel Papworth

I will just say, with the leaked Liberal party pollster report, continuing poor polling results for Howard and the way that Kev's has been accepted in the media (both "mainstream" and alternative social media) - it seems to me that Kevin Rudd for PM has crossed, what Gladwell refers to as, the tipping point. The point of wide and default acceptance, where it seems that people have decided already that Kevin will be the next Prime Minister. This enables people to emotionally invest further with Kevin as the acceptance deepens and widens (oooh I just love it when marketing actually applies to the real world!)

Just In...Someone at work just pointed out to me that since Big Kev died last year, there has been a Kevin-void in society that is being filled by Mr. Rudd. How much time after Big Kevs death do we need to let pass before we can start calling Rudd "Big Kev"?

Cameron Reillys interview with Geoffrey Bowll.. definitely worth a listen

Every now and then one of the guys I work with questions me about my ability to sleep with my eyes open being that I can sit dead still at my desk not moving a muscle. Alas I am yet to master the art of open eyed sleep, more often than not my motionless existence is the result of me being captivated by a podcast. Today was one of those days as my full attention was focused on Cameron Reilly's interview with Geoffrey Bowll, Managing Director of Melbourne based ad agency Starship. I have read back though Bowll's articles in Marketing Magazine with great interest and been very impressed with his views on the marketing landscape, so getting a chance to listen to him speak was highly anticipated and I was not disapointed.

Having spent quite some time absorbing various marketing blogs and podcasts, I often wonder if the marketing gurus who produce such content actually believe all the bullshit they are spouting. I regularly find myself disheartened by the industry that seems to have such a high opinion of itself and this is why I found Bowll's interview so refreshing. He has a very down to earth approach to marketing, makes some very honest assessments of the industries future and seems to understand that marketers don't have all the answers. For this reason I highly recommend anyone who is vaugley interested in marketing to check out Cameron Rilley's interview with him.

Telstra blocks facebook

So Telstra has got some more headlines in the news this week. It seems the have blocked their employees (all 49,000 of them) from accessing the social networking site facebook. Check the article on techcrunch.

For a company that should be at the cutting edge of technology (and perceived that way by both employees and users) and encouraging consumers to get online, this is a ridiculously short-sighted decision from the management boffins at Telstra.

Telstra (or any company for that matter), aside from the fact that they should be trying to ensure employees are treated respectfully and engaged with, should be encouraging their employees to use the products that the company either sells or actively enables (obviously as a Broadband internet provider this would include all the cool things that one might be able to do and interact with online).

Get you employers immersed in your business, submerged in the industry of you business and in love with what your companies products and services can do to enhance their lives and experiences. Encourage them to experiment, look for insights, build social networks and share ideas. This way not only will your employees be true advocates for your company and brand (imagine an entrenched sales culture at every point of your organisation) but they will constantly be looking for better ways, everyday, to do their job and run your business.

A lesson from The Merchants of Cool

So today I was watching the PBS documentary "the merchants of cool" and despite the fact that a lot has changed since 2001 when the doco was aired (Malcolm Gladwell's hairstyle being one of them), it still has some very relevant messages for marketers.

The doco looks at how marketers are doing everything they can to infiltrate the teen landscape in an effort to integrate their marketing message into pop culture thus associating their brand with whats considered "cool". But this brings about the problem, when the drivers of "cool", the early adopters, see what ever it is they are currently into start appearing in the main stream, the "cool" very quickly wears off.

It would be easy to point the finger at marketers as being responsible for ruining what is "cool" but if we wind the clock back to the days before marketers were scientifically employing psychological trickery to coax money from the pockets of the unsuspecting consumer, this phenomenon was alive and well.

The prime example of this is how music trend move through history. There is a good reason why kids todays aren't sitting around listening to Benny Goodman big band albums (well actually some of them are, but for a different reason) and thats because somewhere along the line this style of music was no longer "cool" and thus music progressed to a new sound. This happened again and again right through the last century from rock and roll to punk to disco to rap, etc.. it just goes on and on. As marketers this may seem a little frustrating, but its actually quite the blessing. There will come a day when walking around with an ipod and uploading pictures to your facebook page will be so unbeleavabley uncool that kids will be rolling their eyes at their parents for even saying such a thing out loud and when that day comes marketers will be miles away frustraitedly working on how to integrate their message with whatever IS cool on that day. So for marketers, this constant cycle will ensure the business of marketing will exist for many years to come..