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Google is facing a real problem with ubiquity, while to those inside the company might feel under threat from Facebook, by playing defense they're on a fast-track to even greater ubiquity with Android, etc. Google's plan for little blue links to appear wherever possible is no secret, but the challenge is how to do this in a way that people don't cry foul, start to worry too much about privacy and mention nasty words like "monopoly".

Up until a few years ago, Google was pretty quiet with its ads, if it did them, they were limited to viral efforts on YouTube. The company appeared to not really believe in them or in the traditional ad world in general. It's creative executions were always amateurish, almost as if it was afraid to be considered a real brand. However, fast-forward to now and they appear to be smitten with the ad world. Lavish praise for a Superbowl spot and some nice work from outside agencies for Google Chrome must have helped.

Yesterday, the brand announced the launch of Google Voice and the product team was all bullish about the opportunity and prospects for its introduction. To add icing to the cake, they also talked about their plan to populate universities and airports with British telephone booths where people can trial Google Voice by making free calls. Great idea.



Could this great work be creating more trouble than its worth?

Should Google by letting its product managers spend money to push their products?

Looked at on a case by case basis, it makes sense that products need budgets to launch, but when you ladder up the effect to a brand level, could the effect on the Google brand to make it appear even more ubiquitous than it already is?

For this in charge at Google, who wanted the brand to raise its profile, they have some difficult questions to answer.

What's missing for me are some real stories that shouldn't be coming out of the product teams, but at a brand level explaining how Google is doing good in the world through the work of its foundation and perhaps celebrating some of the other things its made better thanks to its technology.




Posted by Ed Cotton The Wired UK article on the battle between Four Square and Gowalla makes for a fascinating read.

What's especially interesting is the career path that Four Square founder, Dennis Crowley took after graduation. After graduating in communication from Syracuse University in 1999, he wanted to work in advertising, but never ended up there and went to a consulting firm instead. The fact there was nothing for him at the time in advertising isn't surprising, but it's indicative of the lack of opportunity in the business for true innovators and visionaries- if you don't fit the system, there's nothing.

The other interesting element of the story is Crowley's drive to keep pushing at his original idea by learning more through education and evolving it through various incarnations; he was behind Dodgeball.

Although a profitable future for Four Square isn't guaranteed, through perseverance and a clear understanding of the opportunity, Crowley has a created a brand that's highly valued and desired by the investment community.

Here's an excerpt..

"Dennis Crowley graduated from Syracuse University in 1999 with a degree in communications and an eye on getting a job in a New York City ad agency. Instead, he took one at Jupiter Research, a tech-analysis firm, joining a staff of young city dwellers with plenty of disposable income. But Crowley felt that something was missing from his social life. It was too hard to find out where people were; there needed to be a better way to know about the next party.

Citysearch -- a city-specific web guide to restaurants and entertainment -- just “wasn’t keeping up”, he says. At work, Crowley began tinkering with an application that would provide real-time restaurant reviews. He proposed it to his bosses. They said it wouldn’t fly. So Crowley quit, and landed at a company started by a couple of guys from Dean Shaw, a big turn-of-the-century web-investment firm.

They envisioned a future where a handheld computer could help people navigate around cities and experience them more fully. Out of that vision, they’d designed Vindigo, a city guide application for the Palm Pilot, released in 1999. Crowley, whose job title was “product manager”, spent much of his time thinking about how the clunky app could work better. The company later sold Vindigo to a Japanese firm called For-Side, which combined it with a cutesy ringtone app called Zingy.

Long before that, though, Crowley got laid off. Then 9/11 happened, and he was evicted from his West Village apartment. New York was no longer fun. He moved to New Hampshire to work as a snowboarding instructor and plot his next move. In 2004, he entered the interactive-telecommunications master’s degree programme at New York University.

It was a fertile environment for laid-off tech geniuses. For his thesis project, Crowley started designing something that he called “Friendster for cellphones”. A fellow student, Alex Rainert, had similar interests.

After graduating and failing to find work, they formed a partnership. The result was a free application called Dodgeball, a predecessor to Foursquare that sent text messages to your friends when you checked in at specific places. Dodgeball became the favoured online hangout of an elite few, its membership never topping 75,000."

Posted by Ed Cotton According to Campaign, VW is looking for a social media agency in the UK.

This will add another partner to the company's already expansive communications roster, add incremental fees and mean there's more to manage and co-ordinate. In a an environment where budgets and resources are being challenged, it seems counter-intuitive.

However, the media has done a good job, Influx Insights included, in hyping the social media space to such a point that client's probably believe the need a specialist to help them in this complex and challenging environment.

On the surface, at a moment in time when the CMO and his or her bosses seem fixated on the thrills of Facebook and Twitter, holding a review and hiring a specialist seems like a problem solved.

In reality, it might be more trouble that it's worth. If you take a step back and look at how social media breaks down and what's needed, it's pretty basic.

1. Someone has to listen and respond- probably best for the in-house customer service team to work on this.

2. Posting relevant content to get conversation-likely to be split between PR and advertising who both play a role in getting content out to the crowd. Good companies in these fields are already up-to-speed and know the world of social media.

Social media is another channel that must be a part of the communication mix, but fragmenting responsibility, while it seems like a sound plan, might make a marketers life a lot more complicated.

It would be great to get people's thoughts on this topic.


Posted by Ed Cotton Facebook is clearly in some kind of internal crisis with the recent departure of the CFO, it appears the company is engaged in some kind of soul searching around the need to demonstrate serious revenue growth.

Time Magazine seems to believe that Facebook can never make money.

"The reason that social networks will never do well financially is that they break from the successful model that has brought so many marketers to the internet. Display advertising can be targeted by subject. Financial advertisers run messages on AOL Finance (TWX) and TheStreet.com (TSCM). They avoid sites for children's video games. Search sites like Google refined the model by allowing advertisers to buy search engine results pages. The Google results' pages for the search "heart doctors in New York City" is probably the best place in the world for heart doctors in New York City to market themselves."

Sadly, Time is missing the point. Facebook has a giant opportunity to leverage the relationships inside social networks for the benefit of brands.

The multi-billion dollar question is how?

Facebook could do worse than ask the best minds in the agency and media worlds for some creative consultancy help in coming up with ideas to make this work. Ideas that go beyond the banner and weak branded applications. Charging brands for "fan pages" is one way to go, but there are lots of others.

Many pundits suggest that social networks will revolt when ads appear, this hasn't happened to date, and according to research from Razorfish, seems unlikely to.

Facebook is a media monster that will find a way to crack the code as recent events have shown, it just needs some patience to get there.





Posted by Ed Cotton There's a recent article in Ad Age that talks about the ANA meeting where CMOs vented their frustration with ad agencies over their responsiveness and the increasing opportunity they believe exists with media companies.

"Agencies and ad networks came in for some rough treatment at a CMO roundtable during the Association of National Advertisers' annual conference on Saturday as executives vented their dissatisfaction with agency models and ad-network performance. The chief marketing officers of Hewlett-Packard and Charles Schwab openly mulled the attractiveness of bypassing agencies to work directly with media companies and other experiments as they look to fix an agency model they see as broken."

In my view there's some truth to the argument that agencies are somewhat tied to a time intensive process that has to change, but in terms of thinking and ideas, I don't believe media companies can replace agencies.

The reality today is that great ideas matter way more than fast ideas.

Creativity is needed more than ever.

The reason for this is the massive increase in the volume of micro-interactions (emails, Tweets, Facebook updates, viral videos, channel surfing, radio surfing,etc...). I am not going to suggest we are reaching "Information Overload", or that we are suffering from "Future Shock", because I believe in our ability to adapt and manage. However, it's a simple fact that the more stuff you have the harder it's going to be to remember it and just "being there" in a media sense, I believe is no longer sufficient to generate interest, recall and to persuade.

This isn't about just showing up in a media, it's about placing a brilliant idea in media that is contextually right and relevant.

Brilliance has become a mandatory, because without it, there's no way your brand is going to be recalled or make an impact, it will simply be just another message that's ignored and goes in the trash, most of our email.

It's likely the CMOs in the article are merely reflecting back the pressure they are under and things taking time to get to market can add to that. However, the ad industry employs some of the smartest, brightest idea creators around and if clients aren't demanding and using that brilliance, they are missing something that's essential in today's tough times.




Posted by Ed Cotton It's very easy for creative briefs to become shopping lists of client requests for "must haves" to include in the advertising. These living proof points are supposed validation of a brand's existence, but is this the right approach and does it leading to better ads?

Paul Feldwick, the master planner (ex-BMP), argues that great ads aren't about messaging at all, but instead focus on subtle nuances and feelings that they create for the viewer. It's all these intangibles that add up to something way bigger than any specific message.

He uses the example of Budweiser's Wassup.



Here's how he explains it, or tries.

"I think it's actually impossible to analyse exactly how and why they make their effect. That doesn't stop us trying and people often come out with their own answers but I think really it it's what defies analysis.

But the visceral power of analogue communication sits uncomfortably with the fact that most organisations strongly privilege digital communications. In a business meeting we are usually expected to offer facts and figures, logic and analysis; often for very good reasons. But when discussing advertising this tendency strongly biases people to ignore or undervalue the importance of the analogue mode of communication."

Isn't it time to re-think the creative brief?


Posted by Ed Cotton