ZenithOptimedia

Hooray!

Our friends and collaborators over at Right Angle Studios today announced the launch of their city guides iPhone application.

In their words the app delivers three things;
- The best parts of your city are now in your pocket
- So, when you travel in Australia you don't need to feel like a tourist

http://itunes.apple.com/au/app/the-thousands-city-guides/id388602918?#

Its great, get it.

Midalia Steel, Western Australia's premier supplier of steel products, achieves cut-through with a ‘moving’ newspaper ad.

Midalia Steel has a reputation of thinking outside the square when it comes to newspaper advertising. Now they’ve raised the bar with a printed press ad that uses animation to bring the audience closer to both the brand and product. 

Transparency film was inserted into rural and metropolitan newspapers where the ad ran, acting as a pointer ad to the full page execution.

Readers were encouraged to interact with the advert via the headline – Watch them escape. The animated movement is result of the transparent overlay sliding across the vertically lined image.

Readers glide the film from left to right, revealing an animated horse running off the page. The tagline reads, Fence them in with K-Rail.

The innovative concept was recognised in WA's Caxton Creative Exercise this year, with the agency (Ad Impact) winning the competition.

More on Newspaperworks website.

Despite the obvious marketing benefits of these type of promotions its still quite surprising to me that such service is required. As an agency we do recommend Premium SMS mobile entry mechanics for appropriate promotions; the set up cost, ease of set-up and apparent low barrier to consumer entry make this a desirable alternative to online competition mechanics. But such a move by Optus indicates to me that this is perhaps now considered by some to be a 'problem behaviour' and one that is costing Optus customers.  Clearly this service is not one that most with self control would subscribe to and possibly its an over cautious play by Optus to protect them from customer complaints around bills, but i wonder how much of an issue this really is?

Given the popularity of premium SMS does this pose a threat to the mechanic long term? I guess time will tell.

When it comes to watching television, I'll be honest and say that I'm one of the growing Gen Y demographic that does not watch telly. I don't like having to commit to sitting down at a predetermined time of the day just to watch a program.

As most of the telly shows I follow aren't "mainstream" per se, I hate having viewer aggro when the television network decides to can my show in favour of something with higher ratings. Trust me, too much viewer aggro on my part isn't good for health.

But at the end of the day, television is business. There is only so much real estate on networks, and the numbers that make the most profits always win. In the old fashioned tv system, it doesn't really matter how engaged people are with the show. Passion is not rewarded in the telly numbers game.

Something clearly has to change.

Introducing Pioneer One, a new indie sci-fi series that debuted on a bitorrent powered distribution platform Vodo, with P2P file sharing platforms such as uTorrent, Limewire and Pirate Bay also pledging their supports. A quick check on torrents distributing the first episode of Pioneer One at the time of this post - more than 40,000 people shraing content and over 5,000 people downloading today. 

One of the show's filmakers Josh Bernhard made a great observation about how niche shows, though they enjoy high DVD sales and online viewing, cannot sustain themselves on network television:

TV has other priorities than making good TV. You have vocal fanbases whose enthusiasm is ignored, because to networks, their passion isn’t worth more than beating American Idol in the ratings. The fact that TV can’t sustain a show like Firefly, to use a well-known example, with such passionate viewers, shows that something is wrong with how that system works.

The trailer here:

However, it is not the anticipated 1 million views the show receives that makes it a success in my books, but rather the following:

• reaching out to Gen Y demographic (like me), with quality content in a platform we natively use to get our entertainment media (bitorrent).
• the sense of community - ventures like these definitely have a high "talkability" value. Pioneer One leverages this off social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Digg and del.icio.us.
• added value - viewers donate money in order to have the 7 part show running. in return, they get bonus stuff like opening theme mp3 if they donate $5, or even a thank you note in the actual credits of an upcoming episode if they donate $100 amongst other bonus content. 

Click here to download:

Women on the Web - How Women are Shaping the Internet - comScore - June 2010.pdf (1.1 MB)

(download)

Click here to download:

Women on the Web - How Women are Shaping the Internet - comScore - June 2010.pdf (1.1 MB)

See attached an excellent global report from comScore titled "Women on the Web - How Women are Shaping the Internet".

The report summarises differences in internet use between women and men across regions and countries.

Key findings

• Women spend 30 percent more time on social networking sites than men.
• Although 54% of internet users are men, women spend about 8 percent more time online, averaging 25 hours per month on the web.
• Globally, women spend 20 percent more time on Retail sites overall than men. Among the various retail sub-categories, Comparison Shopping and Apparel sites reached the highest percentage of women at 25% and 19% respectively in May.
• In the U.S., women are more avid online buyers than men, with 13% of female Internet users making an online purchase in February, compared to 9% of men.
• Health sites show some of the largest overall differences in reach between female and male, with a nearly 6-point gap between global women and men.
• In most countries women spend less time watching online video than men, but women spend a much higher share of their time watching videos on YouTube than men.
• In both the US and Europe, smartphone usage is dominated by men with both markets experiencing close to a 60/40 split in smartphone adoption between the genders.

Thanks to Frank Harrison @ Vivaki  for this piece of consumer research (US based)

The Zedo Melbourne team made the intrepid 20m walk today across the wintery forecourt earlier this morning to the PWC offices here in Southbank to get a personally delivered IAB / PWC report or online ad spend FY 2009.

Highlights of this report include;

• Online ad spend tipped 2.043Bn - 13% growth yn on yr.
• In context entire ad market dropped 1.2Bn - 8% in the same time frame
• All areas are up yr on yr display grew 11%, Classified up 9% and search grew a huge 16% (nice one Google)

• Direct response accounts for 25% of the $547m display portion (this is still relatively small compared to US and UK where it represents 58% and 55% respectively)
• Video reported a yearly spend of $40m and growing (slowly, due to lack of inventory)
• Category wise Auto, Finance and Tech still lead the display ad spend, but there has been significant gains for the share contributed by FMCG, Beauty and Government clients

Taken to task on what an advertiser should allocate to online media % - Paul Fisher of the IAB was quick to report that 30% is a god rule of thumb for advertisers to consider to give them a good shot at making a mark in their category.

For more information check http://www.iabaustralia.com.au/

This is not surprising, given the above figures from eMarketer. Social gaming revenues are quickly becoming a big blip on the profitability radar. It rose from just US$76 million in 2008 to US$639 million the year after. Revenues for 2010 are expected to grow by 29%. Advertisers are definitely realising this huge growth in the social gaming space; advertising spend in social games could top US$220 million globally this year.

The key findings;

• The most important needs for women revolve around personal growth, as well as their interdependencies on others in their social circle. 
• 44% of women say they get information about products and brands on women’s lifestyle sites.
• Women’s lifestyle sites special interest sites fulfil the most needs for women. They also offer anonymity which can result in deep emotional connections for women.
• Women are most receptive to marketing messages on lifestyle, specialty and review sites. These channels deliver 3 times the impact on purchase decisions in comparison to the other online sites we looked at in the study.

The published article and a PDF download can be found here: http://www.yadvertisingblog.com/blog/2010/07/28/women-need-online/

More People Will Use the Internet
In 2010, there are 1.8 billion Internet users and a world population of 6.7 billion. In 2020, it is estimated that there will be five billion Internet users.

The Internet Will be More Geographically Dispersed
The estimated world population in 2009 was 6,767,805,208. The estimated number of Internet users on December 2000 was 360,985,492. The latest data shows the current number of Internet users at 1,802,330,457. The penetration of the Internet into the population is 26.6 percent. The growth of Internet users from 2000 to 2009 was 399.3 percent.

The Internet Will be a Network of Things, Not Computers
Today, the Internet has 575 million host computers. Expect billions of sensors on buildings and bridges to be connected to the Internet by 2020.

The Internet Will Carry Exabytes, Perhaps Zettabytes, of Content
Internet traffic will grow to 44 exabytes per month by 2012, more than double what it is today. The exaflood refers to the rapidly increasing amount of data that is being transferred over the Internet.

The Internet Will be Wireless
The number of mobile broadband subscribers is exploding. The number of mobile subscribers will increase by 85 percent each year for 3G, WiMAX and other higher-speed data networking technologies. There were 257 million subscribers in the second quarter of 2009. There will be 2.5 billion by 2014.
More Services Will Be in the Cloud
Cloud computing is leveraging third-party computing capability over the network to cut costs, increase scale, improve agility and access best practices. Cloud computing will generate more than $45.4 billion in revenue by 2015.

The Internet Will Be Greener
Annual electricity use in the U.S. for the Internet is 235 billion kWH for PCs and monitors, 45 billion kWH for data centers, 67 billion kWH for modems and routers and 0.4 billion kWH for phone networks. In the U.S., it accounts for 9.4 percent of total U.S. electricity consumption. Annual electricity in the world for Internet use is 588 billion kWH for PCs and monitors, 167 billion kWH for modems and routers, 112.5 kWH for data centers and 1 billion kWH for phone networks.

Network Management Will Be More Automated
Lack of built-in network management techniques is one of the biggest weaknesses in today’s Internet. There will be automated ways to self diagnose, track events and reboot systems as well as finer-grained data collection in 2010.

The Internet Won’t Rely on Always-On Connectivity
Researchers are looking into communications techniques that can tolerate delays or can forward communications from one user to another in an opportunistic fashion, particularly for mobile applications. There’s even research going on related to an inter-planetary Internet protocol which would bring a whole new meaning to the idea of delay-tolerant networking.

The Internet Will Attract More Hackers
In 2010, more hackers will be attacking the Internet because more critical infrastructure like the electric grid will be online. Among hacking incidents in 2009, 57 percent were in North America, 23 percent were in Europe, 6 percent were in Asia, 4 percent were in the Middle East, 2 percent were in South America, 2 percent were in Australia and 6 percent were in New Zealand.
In 2007, there were 0.6 million new malicious code threats. In 2008, there were 1.6 million malicious new code threats.

I would like to credit the source of this info-grahic and observations
www.intac.net/the-internet-in-2020/and the always great blog i discovered it on www.debaird.net

Our colleagues at Vivaki recently dropped some nice comparison tables for Ad spend Vs Time spent from all over the world.

 Global observations play out like this

• The internet is rapidly gaining share of media consumption and spend in all countries
• In all countries newspapers attract a much higher share of adspend than media consumption
• The UK is the only country in the world where the internet attracts a higher share of adspend than media consumption
• TV media consumption has remained largely unchanged in most countries over the last three years
• In all countries radio attracts a lower share of adspend than media consumption

(download)

Click here to download:

Weekly_Hours_Vs_Ad_Spend_By_Me.zip (17 KB)