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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I’ve just finished reading a shocking report issued by Strong Mail regarding email marketing practices and privacy. It would seem that our personal information is being shared freely and being stolen frequently.

“Eighty-one percent of privacy professionals and 56% of marketers report that their organizations ave had a data breach involving the loss or theft of consumer or customer information, with an additional 32% of marketers and 9% of privacy professionals uncertain. Only a small minority of teh privacy professionals and marketers report that their organization has not had a data breach.”

Reading (not so much) between the lines, it would seem that privacy professionals and marketers alike are uncertain about the practices they exercise and the security of their data being more focused on distribution than trust. Of course, this is a crucial subject for brands who are looking to build brand loyalty and trust and goes so far beyond the quality and reliability of their products and services. This affects their customers’ privacy and quality of life. Perhaps there should be an independent method of reporting the brands that rank most highly in best practices and security? Much of the problem seems to occur when companies outsource their email marketing; there’s still so much smoke and mirrors in this industry and shoddy agencies are taking advantage of their clients’ lack of knowledge and insight. It’s something we very much avoid by educating and empowering our clients as much as possible whilst employing best practices.

The report makes some recommendations based around properly auditing 3rd party agencies to ensure security and compliance with internal policy.

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A report out today by eMarketer takes a look at the evolving mobile marketing medium in Japan. Ahead of the rest of us by a significant factor, we’ve been watching not just the technology exploding out of the far East but also behavioral trends around emerging platforms.

The report suggests the reluctance of advertisers to push the technology to the, somewhat, advanced limits it offers and are exploiting opportunities with direct response and some sales response.

It’s important, however, to understand and discuss the relationship we have with our mobile phones and the impact of any ‘intrusion’ from seemingly pushy brands. That relationship is an intimate one and whilst we are clamoring for more and more content and functionality, we are all still demanding privacy and control. It may be the one device in the digital realm that users still ‘own’. We must be sensitive to this and encourage users to engage with the brands we’re representing in an elective manner. Any advertisers pushing unsolicited ads and sales calls via our mobile phones, will be causing more damage to those brands than they suspect.

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The transition from traditional to digital has agencies trying to figure out what their roles are. “What can agencies do with regard to sorting through metrics? Where’s the insight?” were the questions Chas Edwards, publisher and chief revenue officer, Federated Media, pointed out to a morning panel at his company’s Conversational Marketing Summit. The main take away: agencies are big on offering all kinds of metrics to determine if a campaign “worked”; but the definition of success remains a work in progress.

Daina Middleton, SVP of Sunao, Moxie Interactive: The agency can’t assume marketing analytics. That has to be the client’s role to take ownership too. An agency can provide the right measurement and benchmarks and recommended processes… The real insight comes from putting all that together.

Darren Herman, Media Kitchen’s head of digital media: “There will always always be specialist firms in marketing. That’s true on Wall St. Every medium is becoming digital. And when you’re looking at digital TV, online and mobile, there will have to be separate marketing tracks to address clients needs according to those different outlets.”

During an afternoon presentation yesterday, incoming Aegis Media Americas CEO Sarah Fay said agencies need to become producers of content. Middleton: “The agency and the client need to widen their purview. We produce video in-house for clients. When I worked with HP, we had customers create videos, which we could then syndicate—and that’s where the agency came in, in terms of the distribution process and tracking how the content was passed on.” In the future, added Jon Raj, chief digital officer for Omnicom’s OMD, the question will be where should the marketing content be created? “Should it be the clients? Or should it be creative shops or media agencies? Maybe specialist entities? I think it’s going to take a lot of trial and error until we get to to that point. Right now the roles are changing and evolving. I don’t consider my job as ‘media buying’; my job is innovation.”

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Over here at Last Exit, we talk about it all the time; how any campaign has a number of objectives to meet and should certainly be relevant. The campaign for the HBO mini series about the second president, “John Adams” starting Sunday March 16th, seems to have an abundance of it. Naturally supported by the usual suspects in media buy, TV, Outdoor, Print and display ads, etc it’s the Sweepstakes component, called “Power of the Letter” run by the USPS, that really strikes a chord. Unusual for any large organization, they’ve actually customized their homepage to promote the campaign. Interestingly, they’re also offering ‘free’ customized greetings card sent through the mail, to further support the campaign efforts and promote the potency of the written word. www.thepoweroftheletter.com/

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