Research: February 2008 Archives
Our 2008 Digital Outlook Report is out. Register for your free copy. Domestic advertising media billings for the agency grew to $735 million
on more than 1,800 web sites in 2007, up 36 percent from 2006.
Publisher web site spending slipped to 19 percent of billings, down
from 24 percent in 2006. As Jeff Lanctot highlighted, customers don't live on a handful of web sites or portals anymore.
Advertisers still value large sites, but they realize the web presents
a seemingly endless number of advertising options.
And not just that, social influence marketing is changing the way marketers do business in 2008. Don't miss the Social Influence Marketing section in the report which includes social media trends, the six "C"s of social influence marketing, an argument for rewarding users on social networks and the social technographics profile. All the charts from the report are on Flickr too.
Feedback has already started pouring in with Advertising Age and News.com doing pieces on the report. I'm most interested in learning what the bloggers like Rohit Bhargava, Peter Kim, John Bell, Jay Deragon, Matthew Peters, Paul Gillin, Jeremiah Owyang, Shel Israel and Brian Solis have to say about it and specifically the various social media thoughts articulated throughout the report.
And not just that, social influence marketing is changing the way marketers do business in 2008. Don't miss the Social Influence Marketing section in the report which includes social media trends, the six "C"s of social influence marketing, an argument for rewarding users on social networks and the social technographics profile. All the charts from the report are on Flickr too.
Feedback has already started pouring in with Advertising Age and News.com doing pieces on the report. I'm most interested in learning what the bloggers like Rohit Bhargava, Peter Kim, John Bell, Jay Deragon, Matthew Peters, Paul Gillin, Jeremiah Owyang, Shel Israel and Brian Solis have to say about it and specifically the various social media thoughts articulated throughout the report.
Alex Weishaupl, who's an information architect in our New York office, pointed me to this inspirational concept. I loved it. Imagine if a concept like this had social elements too. What if the magnifying glass automatically told me whether there were any friends of mine in that specific building or what if I could have a conversation with someone about that building using the magnifying glass. The opportunities are endless. I can't wait for this to become a reality some day.
Over at Forrester, Mary Beth Kemp and Peter Kim have published a report titled, "The Connected Agency." As Mary Beth Kemp explained to me during a conversation, they believe that as consumers trust brands less, the interactive and advertising agencies will have to get closer to the consumers. Getting closer to the consumers means nurturing consumer connections and facilitating conversations. Mary Beth and Peter believe that within five years the agencies will get closer to the consumer communities and will eventually become an integral part of them. I couldn't agree more and it supports the Social Influence Marketing thesis. Consumers aren't trusting brands as much as they used to, they're trusting and are being influenced much more by each other. It's not a new concept by any means but with the advent of the Internet and the proliferation of social networking websites, it is getting a lot more important.
In my conversation with Mary Beth Kemp I did raise two points that were bothering me - how much can an agency facilitate conversations and nurture connections? I feel this is primarily a job for the brands themselves. They need to become participants in the conversations and connect with their own consumers more directly. Outsourcing those activities to agencies won't be healthy.
Secondly, I'm not sure if I agree with the point that within five years the agencies will get closer to the consumer communities. The reality, at least at Avenue A | Razorfish, is that we're very much a part of those consumer communities. Our employees participate in them everyday as individuals with strong personal identities. In fact, we specifically recruit employees who are active online. Our agency doesn't need to have a formal voice in those communities if that's what the report implies. We're there already in a multitude of ways. I'm sure this is the case with other agencies too.
Cesar Brea was in our offices the other day. A former colleague, Cesar was most recently a Global Practice Leader at Marketspace Global (part of the Monitor Group). So what did we talk about? Social networks of course and more specifically Duncan Watts research on how trends spread.Duncan contradicts some of the more traditional research arguing that how much an influencer a specific node is matters a lot less than earlier thought. It doesn't matter what the composition of the network is. Trends are just as likely to spread through networks full of random, everyday people as they are through networks sprinkled with "influencers." This flies in the face of some earlier research by Ed Keller and Jon Berry that they highlighted in their book, The Influentials. It also contradicts the The Tipping Point premise that Malcolm Gladwell outlined in his first book.
Analyzing email patterns, Duncan Watts discovered that highly connected people are not, in fact, crucial social hubs. His research shows that a slob is just as likely to start a huge trend as a well-connected person is. But that's not all. Duncan has developed a new technique for propagating advertisements virally. Apparently, this technique can quadruple the reach of an ordinary online campaign by harnessing the pass-around power of everyday people and ignoring the influentials. Called Big Seed Marketing, it combines viral and mass marketing into one strategy. You can read more about it in his Harvard Business Review article.
My take? Based on the research I've seen and been a part of, Duncan seems more right than the others. Just by looking at information sharing patterns on social networks, one can see how the centrality of the node matters more than who the actual node in a network is. For an interesting Duncan Watts paper, read The New Science of Networks which was published in the Annual Review of Sociology. Also read the recent Fast Company coverage.