ZenithOptimedia

Gamers are defined by the games they play. For example, the DOTA brand identity is so strong that people who play DOTA call themselves “DOTA players” rather than Warcraft 3 gamers.

Blizzard (publisher of Warcraft, and World of Warcraft) traditionally had a hands off approach when it comes to maintaining their communities and user created mods. DOTA got so popular that the creators of this Warcraft 3 mod went on to independently develop League of Legends, which consequently won the IGN Gamer’s choice award 2009. This resulted in loss of revenue, gaming audience and branding opportunities for Blizzard. 

Despite this, WoW is still more popular than DOTA due to the following reasons:

WoW facilitates the social experience a lot better than DOTA.
This is the crux of why WoW is a lot more successful than DOTA.   Although all online gaming is inherently social, the DOTA gamer is largely a player who games as an individual within a team. There is a lack of shared interests apart from the goal of defeating the other team’s Ancients. The WoW gamer, however, truly plays as part of a guild, where members have different responsibilities and a strong idea of what is appropriate behavior and what is not. In addition, the very nature of gaming on WoW is social. People meet new friends, and catch up with old ones while completing quests and trading items during an auction. To a certain extent, DOTA is not able to provide that environment.

For WoW, the actual online experience defines the brand.
This is the most influential interaction a gamer has with the brand, and also sets up user expectations for all other interactions. The ceasing of user generated maps, items and hacked goods on WoW help contribute to a consistent brand message to users. This in turn will generate a huge demand for publisher created content, as demonstrated by the phenomenal sales of the WoW expansion pack Wrath of the Lich King. On the other hand, due to the lack of regular new content on WoW, content on the expansion pack was expended within a couple of days with quite a number of guilds. Despite this, WoW gamers still game regularly and identify themselves as WoW gamers because their experiences online contributes to their emotional currency and brand experience.

Background
The case study outlined is for a program developed for ‘The Archive’, a collection of retro styled classic shoes and apparel. This range captures the heritage of Puma’s athletic history through iconic design.  

The challenges and objectives

·        Our consumer displayed short attention spans, consumption driven by fads trends, and the “Latest gear”. We also knew that Friend recommendations were a key touchpoint and Puma were not creating much buzz
·        For the brand campaign activity had tended to be Pulse vs. Partnership, so there was a long time between conversations

For this campaign our media objectives were;
·        Re-ignite conversation with Puma Archive consumers
·        Remain top of mind and desirable to early adopters

Who were the target audience, and what was the consumer insight?

People aged 18-24 who are willing to try new and different products, who believe it’s important to look fashionable and who try to play sports as much as possible.  Drawing on our consumer insights resources and research were able to determine that;

“Youth are the connected generation. They thrive on knowing things first and use cultural artefacts as a conduit for connection to friends and peers”

The strategy

From this insight we then sought a way to connect to this audience during their everyday lives whilst still building on Puma’s lifestyle credentials.  We decided we had to go to where the targets were, rather than waiting for them to come to us.  In short, we had to earn the right to be part of their lives. Our recommendation was a Sponsorship of St Jerome’s Laneway Festival.

The campaign was executed in 4 phases;

1. Pre-Event Phase: including marketing support, facebook page, street poster campaign and PR
2. Puma Archive in store promotion: Ticketing giveaway. Buy a pair of Puma Archive shoes on a specific date, and win a ticket to Laneways
3. Event Phase: including curated live cover performances from 4 bands, Film crew, and Photo booth
4. Legacy Phase: Distribution of branded content

In what way was the campaign innovative?

The key innovations that stands out in the assessment of this activation were;
·        The depth of integration we were able to negotiate.  Everything from Staff uniforms, to convincing bands to play songs for us that would be filmed and re-formatted into branded content.
·        The use of social media (facebook and twitter) to amplify WoM and user experiences with their connections

What was the result?
Approximately 15,000 people attended the Sydney/ Melbourne laneway festivals and many more were exposed the promotion, event promotion and could not get tickets.

Overall the campaign was successful in;
·        Highlighting the association between the Puma Archive and a credible festival event through creation of unique branded content and integration into both event iconography and performances
·        Leveraging the target markets’ connectedness and opportunities like social media to drive earned media value
·        Creating branded media through the capturing of user created content photographs, and musical performances from popular bands.
·        Finally the bands performing at laneway were also given access to a VIP pop-up store from which they could select product for their performances and to keep afterward

This months the ZenithOptimedia Moxie Trends video focuses on one of the most talked about social media topics this year: Location Based Services (LBS).

Nicola Smith, Kimberly Davis, Nick Burcher, Adam Hemming and Nicholas Tay are your guides as ZenithOptimedia Moxie take a trip around the globe from the USA, Europe and Asia looking at the big location players and latest developments in LBS. It's not just Google Latitude, FourSquare and Gowalla - we look at local trends in Europe and Asia too.

http://amnesiablog.wordpress.com/2010/05/27/facebook-listens-to-backlash-and-changes-the-ballgame-again/

This will be my third post on TV in a fortnight, and for a media that has remained fairly unchanged over the past 30 years, save for subscription services, the introduction of colour, and the retirement of ROVE this surely indicates BIG changes are afoot.

Top of mind this week for Australian audiences was the launch of 3D Television.  This week saw the first broadcast of a 3D sports event on Fox Sports (with the Socceroos farewell match), this will be swiftly followed up by the first free-to-air broadcast of the State of Origin by Nine, this evening.  The Jury is very much out 3D TV and whether this is gimmick or a viable technology.  Most I have spoken to including heads of sales for two FTA networks and MCN tell me its early days and the broadcasts to date are largely bragging rights related.

So what have I uncovered regarding this technology;

- 3D TV is expensive to produce.  

- The equipment, operation and specialised skills required to shoot and edit it are new, expensive, and require bespoke set up and management

- 3D TV format programming cannot be downgraded or re-formatted to standard definition, this implies that any event or show being made in this format needs to effectively be made twice

- Then there are additional bandwidth requirements, 3D requires more MGHz than HD and almost three times that of standard definition signals. Networks only have a limited capacity allocation and already have to service HD and std. channels, so 3D presents an issue that could mean compromised quality for standard broadcast in order to get a 3D signal out.

On the costs Stephen Leeds of the Ten network indicated that the estimated cost for the 3D broadcasts of this week are in the region of a million dollars, and that the fit out of a 3D truck might even cost up to $18M.

But how big is the audience?
- the estimated number of 3D TV sets out there in Australia as of today is estimated at 6000-8000 with the retailers pushing sports and films like Avatar as key reasons to buy.

So the barriers as they stand;

- Content; there really is not very much to watch yet.  The TV networks see a future in sport, and special events, however the entertainment industry more broadly will be developing content; Movies, of course Avatar paved the way there, Gaming (massive opportunity) and dare i say it Porn (always a ahead of the game) are areas where content is expected to boom.

- Secondly is the revenue model; if content is so expensive to create, how will the content creators off-set these costs? Advertising is one option but it might not yet make it viable.

So this week has seen the launch of mass targeted IPTV via Google TV, and 3DTV thanks to some big sports events, our lounge room lives are about to get way more exciting.

Starling is one of the new breed of Social TV companies looking to capitalise on the emerging behaviour known as "Media Meshing" (that is multi-media tasking, watching TV and tweeting from your phone or iPad at the same time).  Starling in their words are looking to optimise these experience, helping people find the #tags or facebook streams so that people can tap into these concurrent conversations easily and purely. They clearly have a vested interest in commercialising this through their application, but this is only one of companies venturing into this space.  

This media meshing behaviour is already happening in Australia.

If we look at popular programming we can clearly see these blips where mass media and social cross over. The below graph was taken from the time when the final episode of ROVE aired and shows a clear spike in twitter mentions from that single event.

TV is changing fast and this represents but one of only a few ways, so as audiences arguably fragment, the reach for shows might well be said to be narrowing, but therein, but on the other hand the relationship and engagement people have with these programs through social media means they are deeper.

Some context for this move by Google - they clearly see the best way to create a shift in ad dollars is aggressively changing the market place.

- eMarketer estimates that digital video ad spending will jump 48% this year to $1.5 billion.

- TV ad spend is $70 billion market in the U.S. alone. Compare to $25 billion for U.S. online advertising in 2010.

Google TV also runs Android, meaning apps that don't require GPS will also work on your TV (imagine shopping apps, social apps, games etc)

The other interesting implication i've been reading about is what this will do for the SEO community as they now have a whole new brief for getting content found by this new browser.

So what does this mean for Australian markets?
Frankly not a great deal just yet, the barriers to IPTV remain the same, the internet and access are still too expensive and slow currently.  

What this will potentially deliver down the track however is a much more significant change to; traditional broadcast ad models and how content is paid for by these networks. Perhaps this will also have significant implications for the way content is created and paid for, as networks have less cash from advertisers the content owners might well discover distribution hybrid mechanisms like the music industry to get paid.

Exciting times ahead.

Today I attended a briefing on the results of a co-funded IAB brand tracking study for Weight Watchers.  The essence of the research piece was to get across the power of online video in as far as delivering favourable brand metric shifts.

Some interesting stats picked up from the talk and comments made by the presenters relating to online video are that;
- Currently video accounts for only 4% of the overall digital advertising investment
- OS markets have seen huge growth of up to 195% yr on yr

In terms of video performance and brand metrics some learnings that were shared that could prove useful were;
- video is most effective at relatively lower frequencies (less than 3)
- works best when contextually targeted
- is more effective as a pre-roll
- is more effective with audio played
- in terms of brand metrics video
- Video of course was the most effective at delivering shifts in the key key brand metrics

The presenters also made the point that the optimal results were achieved for audiences exposed to a combination of video and standard flash (performance ads).  This of course makes good sense, coupling an emotional engaging message with a more rational (higher frequency) message will aid brand recall, and achieve message association.

It seems clear from this presentation and the numerous presentations I've seen on the past 12-18 months that the local publishing, indeed the global community are very much hoping that video is the tactic/channel that saves the CPM.  The strong message from todays session was not only that video is a great way to deliver brand but that it also represents the lowest hanging fruit in terms of migrating media spend across channel from TV.  

So, all good then.  Well not quite, there is yet a barrier to overcome here and that is that TVC's (read: online video ads) are still expensive to create, and if they have already aired on FTA or STA their life span may be already compromised. So, if one does not go to the lengths of creating made for web content then the video opportunity presented here might still well be missed anyway.

So a challenge for the industry remains - one of cheaper, entertaining or at least interesting video content.  The media is ready to go, we just need some content.

Nielsen has completed its first month of measuring a trial group of Australian mobile publishers in Market Intelligence, its site-side audience measurement tool. This is the first cohesive attempt at measuring off-deck mobile websites (non carrier related - i.e. Vodafone Live! or Optus Zoo).

The results look interesting, and will require some scrutiny in terms of calculating cookie deletion and unique audience - but is interesting to analyse nonetheless. The numbers are consolidated between devices (i.e. sites optimized for different handsets like Nokia or iPhone), they are not de-duplicated and the advertisers are currently limited to News Ltd, Fairfax, NineMSN (and Premier Media Group owned FoxSports).

I have summarised the first batch of monthly data below: ranked by monthly audience size and highlighting the stickiest or most engaging sites.

News.com.au gained the largest audience for April, with just over a million unique browsers. However on average Fairfax news sites The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age had more user sessions per month for a longer average period of time. FoxSports is the stickiest mobile site, clearly catering to sports nuts who spent an average time of 42 minutes a month on the mobile site (though there are only 33,000 of them per month currently using the site). There could be some debate as to why Fairfax's news sites are stickier than News.com.au (audience or content or user-experience) and why people spend much more time on NineMSN than News.com.au (more video content?). At this stage we can only speculate and watch the monthly data roll in and average out a bit more.

View the image gallery below for today's screenshots from the largest sites.

There are obviously some big publishing names missing from this dataset, some who have large audiences (Google, ABC, Bigpond, CarSales.com, RealEstate.com.au) and some that are lagging behind in their mobile product in general (Yahoo!7). But it is a good starting point, and might surprise some people in terms of the size of audience and time spent with media some of these sites are not commanding.

Let's hope that that more sites get on board over the coming months so we can start to get a less fragmented view of mobile audience measurement and invest appropriately in the medium.

Read more …

Here is a nice piece of social advocacy in banner.  ZO & FOXTEL worked with Adconion to develop a highly engaging expanding video ad unit that couples a selection of FOXTEL videos highlighting the benefits of IQ with tweets referencing FOXTEL programming.

The combination provides a compelling product message supported by verbatim advocate commentary.