According to latest reports from Cisco, video currently generates more traffic in the US than was transmitted across the entire Internet backbone in 2000. Even though video online collapsed for a short while after the internet bubble burst, the technology, bandwidth and desire to watch video online has bounced right back and this time, it’s no bubble.

Additional research is showing that people, and in particular, young men, are moving their entertainment centers to their computers and watching content online: what they want, when they want it. Along with the heightened experience, data shows that users/viewers are watching longer segments than before, further enforcing the idea that the computer is fast becoming a viable and desirable entertainment device. Interestingly, these migrants from TV to internet are much more accepting of inline ads (pre-roll, mid-roll, post-roll).

Content developers and other people involved i the traditional TV industry still argue against the ‘a la carte model’ and online remains to poor cousin. Despite of lower quality compression for online, people are voting with their feet and marching straight to their computers to watch only the (quality) shows they want to watch at time that suit them.

In my opinion, the advertising opportunities are far great here as we can truly create a targeted ad model against a medium that affords us 100% accountability. What’s not to love, eh?

Rather than preaching about why computers, internet and pay per view / a la carte are the future, I want to redirect my observations and questions to the delivery mechanisms themselves and the skill behind programming. For me, there are two things that must carry over from TV to our smaller screens:

1. Programming: I truly believe that web 2.0 has forgotten an important part of passive viewing, listening. We watch TV and used to listen to radio because we trusted the presenters, programmers, DJs to introduce us to something we might not have found by ourselves or via our peer groups. We need to re-introduce an element of programming and taste along with the content we create. Portals such as YouTube are good at what they do, but a vast majority of users only ever view content that is sent to them by the (much smaller) group of people who create or crawl. So much of YouTube’s audience is highly ephemeral and the related videos stream manages to capture the casual user for, perhaps, one more viewing.

My assertion here is that we need to find a new device for keeping people at the new sites/entertainment portals we create and the first part of this is a new approach to programming, perhaps though targeted content based on user profiles/behaviour. Pretty similar to how traditional programming is currently done on TV.

2. Interface Design: in response to this new targeted content, advertising and programming model we need to develop new GUIs for watching video that allow people to interact with the device in a simplified, more linear fashion. We still need to offer tools for customization, search, sharing etc. for the smaller percentage of more active people, but we must identify the elements that will keep people viewing longer and enjoy the experience more.

Apple does their part with the constant development of video codecs and even adobe with their Flash video platform is coming on leaps and bounds in terms of higher quality whilst maintaining, seemingly unfeasible, small file sizes. HD content is cropping up more and more to make our high pixel density screens sing and 5.1 surround sound is a reality. So, for 2009 I think we need to see video line take a different path to the less effective web 2.0 approaches we’ve seen so far.

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We all have some sense of the extent online research for product purchases and recent research in the US shows that 6/10 people make the internet their first choice for research items ultimately purchased in the brick-and-mortar-store. More an dmore retailers, therefore, are eliminating web-exclusive prices or extending them to instore pricing.

Some stores such as Staples, are offering kiosks where shoppers can peruse their websites and garner product information and reviews. The opportunity this offers is an ‘infinite aisle’, where shoppers are exposed to the stores full inventory regardless of what the store might currently have n stock. In response to this, it’s interesting to note that loss of sales to competitors due to stockouts measures $93 billion in 2008. Two reasons to have kiosks in store: 1) offer more information and empower your customers and 2) avoid losing customers.

The question this beckons is whether response policies, particularly regarding shipping and handling, need to be in place to ensure that custom is not lost, even with the ‘infinite aisle’ and, perhaps perhaps more importantly, whether retailers should consider how their website are planned and designed to allow easy or even seamless transition to an in-store kiosk application environment. The users extended cognitive architecture is completely different in this situation and as we research the psychographics as part of determining site strategy, instore browsing and researching probably should be properly taken into account.

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The lead article in todays Ad Age Daily news covers, in part, a study examining the effects and possible contribution to the rapidly growing (excuse the pun) obesity epidemic in the US. With particular focus on the African-American community, it suggests that marketing to this group has been squarely focused at fast food chains and not healthier options and complains that in poor neighborhoods all you can find to eat is bad food.

My concern with this kind of research is simple that it doesn’t capture the broader picture, e.g. that fast food, and in particular budget meals at fast food chains, is targeted at poorer people generally not just poorer African Americans. It also makes a very relative and unquantifiable statement, that the marketing “contributes”.

Well, how much does it contribute? Is that contribution 50% contribution to other socio-economical shifts, or is it a tiny/negligible amount?

So, my point, though more of a political one is that we are constantly moving towards a system or blame and lack of responsibility for oneself. Ignorance may have a part to play here: is it McDonalds’ fault if a person picks up a scalding hot coffee from a drive through, places it in her lap and subsequently burns herself as she pulls away? No!  And it’s also probably not their fault when people get fat because they eat McDonalds at every meal (including more than one sandwich, fries and a soda).

Of course I do appreciate that there should be boundaries: I don’t agree with soda drink manufacturers sponsoring schools and planting their vending machines in every vestibule, or misleading advertising. I also agree that we haven’t done enough, particularly in the last 8 years, to resolve our extreme poverty problems here in US, but ultimately, people must take responsibility: to educate themselves (the only way to improve your status) and to keep yourself fit and healthy. You don’t need an Equinox membership to do that.

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According to Bornstein Research, ad dollars being directed to the web by car manufacturers did not fall in Q1 of this year.  The industry has had a rough year and much it has to do with a lack of innovation and sudden panic to play catch up with the rest of the modern world, as I wrote in a previous post.  The good news is, that most of the manufactures and their brands are shifting gears and pushing marketing dollars behind smaller, fuel efficient models.  So, if your agency is currently working with an auto brand (as we are), you should be in good shape.

See the full article at eMarketer.

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I’m a big fan of the Ted Conference and one of my first video podcast subscriptions and on the train coming back into the city from Queens this morning, I watched a great and very short speech by Richard St. John. An interesting topic for us being business owners and entrepreneurs, and a constant question for us is “why do we do this?” and “how have we been/how will we continue to be successful?”. 7 years of research, is summarised in just a few lines and 3 minutes. In short he explains that in order to succeed you need to satisfy the following 8 steps:

1. Passion: you’ve got to love what you do!
2. Work:you’ve got to put your back into it.
3. Good: you have to be damned good at what you do and continue to develop to stay ahead.
4. Focus: don’t let yourself be distracted. Set your sights on something and make it happen.
5. Push: Push yourself physically and mentally. If you’re lucky your parents pushed you! Push through shyness and self doubt.
6. Serve: offer others something of great value.
7. Ideas: keep them coming - listen, observe, be curios, question, problem solve and make connections.
8. Persist: you can’t give up at the first hurdle. Persist through failure, critism, rejection, pressure and all the assholes!

Click Here to watch the video.

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According to eMarketer, North America is likely to surpass Asia Pacific in mobile gaming revenues due, largely, to the iPhone and the Apps store launch: “Screen Digest said the iPhone would drive mobile gaming revenues to more than $1.5 billion in North America in 2012, up from $930.5 million this year.” Worth a quick peek at this excellent posting I referred to in an earlier blog, that discusses the iPhone’s breakthrough from a developer’s point of view.

This again reinforces the notion that people are:

1. Hungry for content and entertainment on the move (eben if that means sitting on their couch)
2. Eager to maximize the investment they made in their spanking new iPhones
3. Happy to hand over ca$h for content if they’re given a safe, reliable, enjoyable and easy to use method (iTunes in this case).

Right, I’m off to dream up ideas for iPhone games that will make us $Millions.

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Haha, and just as I’m writing about the noise in email campaigns, eMarketer posts and article outlining the shortening gap between email and search. Read the full article here and if you’re not already registered yet, do it now, it’s a great news source for our industry.

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Like it or not, your website is a living breathing entity that courts many visitors (hopefully) and much opinion. It lives out there for many months and even years and often sits there festering by not responding to moving trends and user behavior.

OK, this maybe stating the obvious but we are still a little surprised that many of our clients’ briefs do not include on-going maintenance and support. We endeavor to empower our clients with robust content management systems and most often opt for externally supported technology so that our clients’ are not encumbered by a dependance on us based on proprietary/legacy systems. Great! Of course we’re happy to continue to develop our relationships by providing valuable support in terms of design and technology resource but more importantly, these extended relationships should be based on research, analytics and strategic response.

It’s a blessing and a curse in many ways, that we have the opportunity to constantly fine tune a website or web-based campaign and it’s important to understand that for most ‘projects’ the goal posts are constantly moving: company information/portfolio/people, user behavior in terms of site interaction and in how people use search engines, competition, technology etc. etc. etc. All of which should be monitored and responded to in order to be as effective and as relevant as possible and to achieve constantly ascending success.

Beyond the website, it is also important to understand the greater conversation about your brand. Run a search for a recent campaign and you might be surprised by the number of results. We recently completed a site as part of a broader campaign by a large electronics manufacturer, with no-little follow up. For our own purposes we constantly ran reports and discovered that almost all the top search results were not controlled or influenced by the brand and a few were extremely negative responses. Your website must have tentacles!!

So, make sure that any design work you undertake is underpinned by a sound digital strategy targeting success criteria that will make your campaign or project pay for itself. And be sure to not let your site collect dust on some shared hosting environment. For many, it’s the first part of your brand that is seen and for customers, prospects, employees and potential employees it will leave an impression.

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Having come from a product design background and being a complete petrol head (cars/bikes not sea birds), I’m always fascinated by latest trends in the automotive world. As a European, I’m particularly into how high design, innovation and quality engineering applied to smaller cars. So, I was a little miffed by this article in the New York Times this weekend expressing the concept that, ys, we need to adjust the way we think about cars in the US, how we need to think of it as much more of a utility and than an expression of self worth, social status etc. Now, whilst I agree Ms Navarro in that our thinking does need shift I also disagree that small cars represent a compromise. The problem that American car companies face is that they have invested all their development into big cars, particularly SUVs and large sports sedans. Don’t get me wrong, there are some amazing vehicles in this class but one thing the European and Japanese car companies did was to learn from the first big oil crisis in the seventies and to commit development to highly attractive, efficient cars able to outperform many of their bigger cousins. New Ford CEO Alan Mulally, quite correctly, suggested that America’s second largest car manufacturer must to learn some essential lessons from it’s European (franchised) relations - in Europe where Ford is a highly innovative car company who regularly sits at the front of the grid when it comes to small cars.

As with many things, you can suggest that the general public must lead the way in forging a new path but it’s up to the industry leaders, the innovators the designers and those holding the purse strings to path a new road, and we don’t have to look very far and in the short term, we don’t even have to worry too much about alternative fuels (the average MPG of American cars is the same as the original Model T Ford!!). There are many, many examples of cars from the rest of the world that are highly desirable and fuel efficient to boot! The Mercedes A class, still has not made it to US shores. Companies such as Fiat, Peugeot and Renault who constantly produces some of the world best hot hatches, still don’t wade through the Atlantic to present their wares here, whilst VW have two smaller cars, Polo and Fox (yes, smaller than the Rabbit) that represent fine design in a small package, are not brought over.

And, there’s more that can be done. Once marketing has driven better product development, more investment and better thinking needs to be applied to branding and advertising these vehicles. Lotus unfortunaltely has not done a good job with the amazing Elise. A car that weighs next to nothing, has only a 1.9litre engine and could outperform many supercars vastly more explensive and gas guzzling. The best marketing example to date, is probably BMW’s Mini Cooper, but let’s take a look at the new Fiat 500,

another European design icon recently brought back to life along with countless other products that will garner a cult like following.

So, we’ll try and love our small cars but give us more and give us something better!

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Funny how even though I spent hours and hours and bundles of cash setting up an awesome home entertainment system, that the television remains predominantly my wife’s domain. It’s OK, because mostly I think TV is filled with crap. We enjoy movies together and show photos and home video (thanks to AppleTV), so I get my slice. So last night I took advantage of having the apartment to myself (oh and my dogs) to turn the volume up, crank up the sub-woofer and watch the animated Batman - Gotham Knight. Navigating the AppleTV interface is, as you would expect, perfectly intuitive and quite enjoyable, and when I landed on said movie, I thought that maybe I’d want to own it. However, my options were restricted to: Rent, Rent HD and buy, but with the buy option you only get the standard definition version.

DAMN!!! Content providers are still, unbelievably fighting digital distribution and hiding behind ignorance and paranoia. Their fear being that if they allowed you to buy the HD version, that you would automatically go rip it, burn it, duplicate it and sell it buy the thousands down on New York,s Canal Street , thus financially crippling the studios, networks and anyone else who’s cowering in the ignorance corner.

The fact remains and always will that piracy will always be here but will always be restricted to those making a (small) business out of it or/and are bothered to go through the countless steps to do so. Personally, I have the ability, technology and infrastructure to rip/download movies strip out the DRM and share with my friends and family. But I don’t because I can’t be bothered. I have endless better things to do with my time and sooner charge my time out to clients, who need me, for multiples over the value of a $15 movie.

As we all know, Apple boldly made this step with iTunes much to the derision of the entertainment community who mostly believed it wouldn’t work and that everyone would continue to download music via peer-peer networks. Wrong. Give people the right way to do things in an easy to use manner representing an enjoyable and utilitarian experience and they will (well over a billion songs sold on iTunes so far). Yes, the big record companies are still crying in their milk but their just too big and too old to change quickly. So is it just me, or is it crazy that the studios and networks are still fighting it?

Back to last night and my personal experience: I rented the HD movie for $4.99. I wouldn’t buy the SD version for $10, not with my awesome home entertainment system, no sir!! But, I would have gladly given them $15 of my hard earned moolah for a copy of the HD version, which would have sat very happily on my AppleTV, without ever being ripped, burned and shared with anyone else.

The next in my line of fire is the Telcos - an industry which has basically devolved into a monopoly once again - and the slow development of wireless technology in infrastructure and handsets compared with the rest of the world. Again, we see Apple rock the boat . Regardless of the shambles demonstrated at time of launch for the new 3G iPhone and regardless of what you or I think of the device. The most important aspect has been the incredible approach to digital distribution, here in terms of the developers kit and the application store. Super Monkey Ball has already made approximately $5million for Sega! Bloody incredible. I read a fantastic blog posting regarding mobile app development this morning. Worth a read and further evidence that traditional distribution channels are altering - significantly.

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