Brand Darwinism

Mark Hancock, Strategy Director at Proximity London:

Only those that can survive the online scrutiny of millions of people rating and debating a product’s inherent utility will survive. Price points will be determined by benefits rather than features. Advertising may become redundant for certain categories...

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It's time to wake up

David Armano has an inspired rant against the flash microsite mindset:

There are literally millions of enthusiasts out there producing quality content in highly search engine friendly formats. Not only is much of their content easier to find on the Web - it's engaging, relevant, and the people who produce it actually talk back to us. It's time to wake up.

Read on.

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Reporting from the digital front line

Richard Huntingdon, former Planning Director of HHCL and United London:

very few people in advertising agencies really understand what clever digital agencies can do for their clients. So I thought I’d jot down some observations on the [IMAA entries] from the perspective of a planner from an above the line tradition trying to understand what is going on.

Read on.

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Beer goggles

A couple of sweet MPUs from Grand Union - check em.

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Stimulus / response

Stephen King's 1974 JWT Planning Guide is a fascinating bit of archive material, well worth a read even in this day and age. You should also check out its unofficial companion, a Jeremy Bullmore speech to a conference of Kraft bigwigs in 1972. Genius.

[via]

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Context isn't king

You'll need to take this with a pinch of salt, as the study's been funded by companies selling behavioural targeting, but Adweek reports:

New research casts doubt on the long-held belief that advertising is most effective when placed near content related to the product. Product ads displayed out of context had roughly the same impact on brand preference as identical placements shown next to related content.

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The IAB's new Brand Engagement study

Guy Phillipson, the IAB's chief executive:

Predictably TV is still king, but online clearly performs well – especially on the key ‘trust’ metric – so it’s important that that FMCG advertisers allocate greater proportions of their media budgets online in order to fully achieve brand engagement with their increasingly digital audiences.

More here.

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The Campaign Digital and the Creative Showcase awards

Ok - I've got a bumper crop of great online creative for you. Firstly, here are the winning entries from the Campaign Digital awards. Then there's both August's and July's winning entries from the Creative Showcase. Enjoy!

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Why Word of Mouth is the future of marketing

Richard Owen gives a good overview on why Word of Mouth is the future of Marketing. There's no one quote to pull out, it's all good solid stuff. Go read it.

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See you at ad:tech?

For those of you attending (and up early enough to read your RSS feed before you head off), I'm speaking at ad:tech today in the Monitoring Consumer Conversations Online session at 11:45am (and I'll be talking about starting and joining conversations rather than just monitoring them) - come watch and join in the conversation afterwards. And of course, I'll be at Chinwag's post ad:tech drinks tomorrow night...

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Facebook is now bigger than MySpace

One month earlier than predicted, Facebook has overtaken MySpace, with more UK unique users in August (6.5 million) than MySpace (6.4 million). As Revolution points out, both are now visited by one in every five Britons online:

“Some have theorised the future of social networking will revolve around specific interest-groups as opposed to the general behemoths that dominate today. The fact that a number of the fastest-growing networks concern specific interest areas, such as business (LinkedIn), travel (WAYN) or music (Imeem), seems to add credibility to this theory,” said Alexander Burmaster, European Internet Analyst, Nielsen//NetRatings.

In terms of social network engagement, Britons spent the most time on Facebook most total (991 million minutes) followed by Bebo (600 million minutes) and MySpace (540 million minutes). Virtual world Second life is the leading social network in terms of monthly time per visitor (5 hours 29 minutes) followed by teen community Habbo (3 hrs 6 mins) and Tagged.com (2 hrs 40 mins).

The social networking boom shows no signs of slowing - almost half (48 per cent) of Britons online (15.3 million people) visited at least one of the ten most popular social networks in August 2007.

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Sony's Blu-ray social media campaign

RMM's Leo Ryan on their recent social media campagin for Sony's Blu-ray:

this campaign has been to actually get Sony into the Blu-ray conversation by creating assets, snippets and digital morsels of interest to Blu-ray's various audiences.

Read on.

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Influence Ripples

David Armano on Influence Ripples and Social Media Fragmentation:

Successful personal and corporate brands alike will be the ones who take a holistic view when creating, maintaining and amplifying their ripples. This means avoiding the temptation to hyper fixate on one venue thinking it's a replacement for another.

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After Kate Modern, comes Sofia’s Diary

A new interactive drama series, ‘Sofia’s Diary’ from Sony Pictures Television International is to air on Bebo.com this Autumn. ‘Sofia’s Diary’, is the second interactive drama series to be introduced by Bebo. It follows the success of the recently launched KateModern (more), which attracted over 3 million views in its first eight weeks.

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Banner blindness

Jakob Nielsen confirming the obvious:

The most prominent result from the new eyetracking studies is not actually new. We simply confirmed for the umpteenth time that banner blindness is real. Users almost never look at anything that looks like an advertisement, whether or not it's actually an ad.

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