Archive for the ‘Digital media’ Category
April 26th, 2013
After the announcement on Thursday that Britain has avoided a triple-dip recession with the economy expanding more than expected by 0.3 per cent in the first quarter, WPP’s results have added additional hope by confirming 2.1% growth in total revenues to £2.5bn.
The UK’s services sector helped to boost gross domestic product (GDP) growth to beat the 0.1% expected by analysts, according to figures from the Office for National Statistics. The sector rose 0.6% on the quarter.
WPP’s results are often seen as a key barometer for the marketing/advertising markets, and the latest figures show WPP is running ahead of its own budgets for the first quarter, with a performance in the UK that went against the market trend, growing revenues 3.7% to £318m.
The key North American market, which accounts for 35% of WPP’s total revenues, shrank 1% in the first quarter to £886m.
Elsewhere, Latin America and Asia Pacific grew strongest at 7.8% to £736m, leading WPP to reconfirm that it expects revenue growth for the full year to be about 3%.
Interestingly, WPP said that it has won $1.5bn (£970m) worth of new business from clients in the first quarter, down from $1.85bn in the same quarter last year.
WPP also confirmed that its advertising and media buying operation, which accounts for 41% of total group revenues grew at 3.9% to £1.03bn in the first quarter. Within this the media buying business grew revenues by 7.4% in the first quarter.
Unfortunately, WPP’s public relations and public affairs operations did not do so well, shrinking by 4.1% in the first quarter to £221m.
WPP confirmed that business was “particularly difficult” in North America, western continental Europe and Asia Pacific, but stronger in the UK and Latin America.
Last week, Publicis Groupe reported a first-quarter revenue falls of more than 6% in its European and UK operations.
With recovery likely to be a long and slow road, these figures hardly give cause for mass celebration, and it is yet to be seen if this growth can be sustained. However, growth, especially in the UK, is a positive sign and we need to take the positives in what will be a marathon slog.
Increase Your Speed to Market with Mobile – SDL Bemoko webinar
April 14th, 2013
I had the privilege of moderating an excellent webinar last week where Phillip Clement, Marketing and Sales Director of SDL Bemoko presented some great ideas and data how to increase your speed to market with mobile.
Phillip focused on ways to manage customer experience across multiple channels, dealing with the rapid pace of change in technology, the blurring of real with digital worlds and the imperative to control budgets.
The presentation deck was lengthy and packed with excellent info so there is only space here to touch upon some of the themes but you can download it through a link at the end of this post.
Phillip advised on practical ways to simplify mobile and tablet delivery, for marketers to adapt more quickly their campaigns for mobile faster, to manage customer experience across multiple channels and respond to the rapidly changing needs of customers.
He explained that “Doing mobile” is not the challenge; rather the challenge is delivering against expectation, keeping pace with change and breaking down traditional silos – marketing and IT. This necessitated the deployment of the right technology, empowering IT staff, reduce cost and complexity of delivery, speed commercial innovation without compromising resilience and ensure that businesses were always ahead of customer adoption
Phillip advises: “Traditional methods will bog down progress and increase cost, when you are trying to control budgets effectively.”
He believes that early adopters and late to market businesses are now on a level playing field but that customers’ expectations are high and businesses with agile technology platforms will succeed and grow faster than their competition.
Multi-channel or omnichannel marketing is rapidly becoming the de facto standard for brands of all sizes, and the technology engagement layers within these are becoming more complex, including wearable web devices, even “sentient tattoos”.
This is why marketers and IT professionals within companies must find new, more agile ways to communicate.
You can download the SDL Bemoko deck here.
Newspaper sales continue to decline, as online growth builds
March 20th, 2013
2013 has been a difficult year for the newspaper industry with press regulation post-Leveson enquiry and falling sales, but online growth offers a ray of light.
As we await the latest ABCs, a look back at last month’s figures show a sharp contrast in the outlook for newspapers online and offline.
Overall, total national daily circulation was down 8.32% to 8,240,400 over 12 months:
- The Times suffered the least with circulation down just 0.94%
- The Mirror fell 5.91%
- The Daily Mail lost 5.97%
- The Telegraph was down 6.52%
- The Guardian shrunk 10.37% putting it below 200,000 circulation
- The Sun fell by 11.63%
- The Star dropped by 13.19%
- The Independent reported a 28.56% fall
The one winner, i was up 12.7%, helped by a 20p cover price.
However, online it’s a very different story.
In brief:
Mail Online added nearly 1 million daily unique browsers month-on-month to end up with nearly 8 million – a new traffic record. The Mail site recorded a 13% rise compared with December to reach an average 7,977,039.
Guardian.co.uk also set a new traffic record with 4,319,370 average daily unique browsers, an increase of 17% month-on-month, helped by record video views that rose 40% from December to January to 11.3m across the month.
Telegraph.co.uk was up 11% month-on-month to 3,129,599 average daily unique browsers.
Sun.co.uk and Mirror Group Digital recorded 1,816,106 and 1,064,924 average daily unique browsers respectively, equivalent to month-on-months rise of 16% and 24%.
Independent.co.uk reported a 25% increase from January to 1,214,144 average daily unique browsers.
In terms of the free papers, The Evening Standard saw daily average browsers increase 45% month-on-month to 207,484 and Metro.co.uk recovered after a traffic dip in December following the launch of a more mobile-friendly site. Average daily browser numbers bounced back to 260,119.
We wait to see how the current figures look, but my bet is the trends will be much the same with online continuing to build and offline looking decidedly shaky.
A deeper look at the demographics of Social Media Users
February 19th, 2013
The Pew research Center has recently releases its U.S.- focused social networking report
which highlighted some interesting trends on who’s using social media most and which social networks are most popular.
You can download the full report here:
In summary: “The Demographics of Social Media Users 2012” study found that the most frequent social media users are women aged 18 to 29. Women have been significantly more likely to use social networking sites than men since 2009. In December 2012, 71 percent of women were users of social networking sites, compared with 62 percent of men.
Overall, 67 percent use Facebook, and 16 percent use Twitter, which is especially appealing to adults in the 18 to 29-year-old category. Key demographics are charted in the images at the bottom of this post.
Pinterest has practically caught up with Twitter, with 15 percent of adult U.S. Internet users.
Pinterest, which launched in 2009, has experienced explosive growth. Women are five times more likely to use Pinterest (5 percent vs. 25 percent) and almost twice as likely to be white and college-educated.
13 percent of U.S. online adults say they use Instagram, 6 percent say they use Tumblr, and 20 percent of U.S. online adults say they use LinkedIn as of August 2012.
40 percent of mobile phone owners use a social networking site on their phone, and 28 percent do so on a typical day.
The report also looked at Creators and curators, defining them as follows:
As of August 2012:
• 46 percent of U.S. adult internet users post original photos or videos online that they themselves have created. We call them creators.
• 41 percent of U.S. adult internet users take photos or videos that they have found online and re-post them on sites designed for sharing images with many people. We call them curators.
Overall, 56 percent of internet users do at least one of the creating or curating activities studied and 32 percent of internet users do both creating and curating activities.
Interestingly, not using social media may be an elite thing. Those with a college degree are slightly less likely than those with some college education to use social networks (69 percent vs. 65 percent).
Retailers have survived the first digital coming, but what’s next?
January 25th, 2013
(This post was originally published on Mob76 Outlook as a guest post)
HMV’s recent demise was hardly a surprise. The writing has been on the wall for so long that it’s been painted over and graffitied many times since.
If we rewind ten years to 2003, the conversation around retail was focused on the importance of the web , and although not all major retailers had made the move to reinvent their web presence, it was on the agenda.
In many cases this move took some time to happen and latecomers lost market share and revenue opportunities… but those up against the online leaders such as Amazon (launched 1995) and Play.com (launched 1998) lost much more. They eventually lost a business.
To read the full post please click here Mob76 Outlook
Mobile set to drive U.S. online ad spend beyond 25% of total ad budget
January 14th, 2013
According to J.P. Morgan, online advertising will pass a key milestone during 2013, accounting for one out of every four dollars spent by U.S. advertisers, as they increasingly follow consumers online.
Internet sector analyst Doug Anmuth has highlighted the importance of Internet-connected mobile devices, as well as the continuing momentum of social media platforms as a key part of online’s growing influence.
Writing in a report released to investors last week, Anmuth confirmed: “As consumer behaviour and time spent online rapidly shifts towards mobile, we expect advertising dollars to follow. We are projecting Internet advertising in the U.S. to grow to $43.5 billion in 2013.”
This represents a 17.4% growth on 2012 online ad spending levels and puts online media at 25% of all U.S. ad budgets.
To underline the influence of mobile, Anmuth estimates about half of the projected growth will be coming from mobile web ad spending. Without the mobile stimulus, online ad spending would grow by roughly 10% from 2012.
The importance of online is nothing new, but it’s continued solid growth and our demand to be connected everywhere is impacting all forms of media, and dictating the development of the advertising that we consume.
Ad funds will always follow the consumer, and the consumer is staying connected, no matter where they are.
Full story here.
UK shoppers spend the most online
December 14th, 2012
The UK is leading the way when it comes to shopping online, according to Ofcom’s International Communications Market Report.
The report looks at the take-up, availability, price and use of broadband, landlines, mobiles, TV and radio across 17 major countries: UK, France, Germany, Italy, the US, Canada, Japan, Australia, Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden, Ireland, Poland, Brazil, Russia, India and China.
Ofcom’s figures confirm that consumers in the UK spend an average of £1,083 a year when shopping online, compared with Australia which spends the second highest at £842.
Mobile devices play a large part in the success of online retail in the UK, and we download more data from our mobiles than any other nation. In fact, 16% of all web traffic in the UK is from mobile devices, which is more than any other European country.
Outside of Europe, British mobile use still leads the way, for example; in December 2011 the average UK mobile connection used 424MB (megabytes) of data, higher than Japanese users who averaged 392MBs.
Considering the UK population’s love of mobile access, it’s not surprising that we have one of the highest penetrations of smartphones, with almost 60% of British mobile phone owners saying they have one, second only to Germany, and up from 46% in the last report.
Only 37 per cent use a desktop computer as their most frequent means of accessing the internet.
Social networks have played a key role in demand for mobile devices, with 40% of UK adults accessing their profiles via the medium.
British 18-to 24-year-olds are also proving to be the world’s top mobile social networkers, with 62% accessing their profiles from smartphones and tablets, a higher proportion than any of the countries analysed in the report.
Social networks, the filter bubble and the ‘media of I’
November 13th, 2012
This article was originally published on Wired UK, November 12th, 2012 as a Guest post by Lloyd Gofton:
As we move from an age of mass media to one of social media, are we experiencing a rebalancing of cultural communications towards disintermediated storytelling?
In today’s technology-enlightened civilisation, many believe that changes to the way we communicate are being driven by global networks and new technologies.
Conversely, it has also been argued that our approach to storytelling in the digital world is in many ways similar to that of the mediaeval era where information and stories were shared orally among distributed communities.
According to that rationale, technology is merely the facilitator of our natural urge to tell stories, not the raison d’être. After all, are we really that far removed from our humble beginnings? Have oral traditions merely been replaced, or possibly enhanced, by digital networks? Could it be the case that mass media was a step too far and are we now experiencing a re-balancing of our cultural communications as we find a new equilibrium of information vs. conversation?
To identify why we are so reliant on mass media, it’s important to understand how we got to our current situation.
Read the full article on Wired
Content 4.0 – what we will pay for [infographic]
November 5th, 2012
I spotted this excellent infographic on what content we would pay for and thought it might be useful and relevant to you.
Business Insider (not a client) produced the infographic (click on the image for full size) believes that “Media” no longer encompasses merely content, but also commerce, payments, and platforms. It says that in a post-cash, networked, and mobile-enabled society, there are new business models work for digital publishers and digital companies.
Business Insider‘s New York city event  on November 27-28th - IGNITION: Future Of Digital – is a two-day conference that will explore the successful and emerging business models of digital media.
It has lined up a truly impressive speaker list and I think it would be well worth following. More details here
The themes of the New York event chime with our ideas at Liberate Media. We believe that sharing useful, timely and relevant content is now the most important element of any PR campaign. It has a clear and measurable value for brands.
While we work in the Earned Media world, where free content is used to build brand authority, reputation and trust, we can also see the rise of content forms, provided by savvy publishers that people will pay for, particularly on mobile devices.
For example, we’ve seen the recent launch in the UK of 12ahead, led by editor Andy McCormick, a young veteran of the digital marketing sector.
12ahead provides quality information that is not easily found anywhere else on the web and has a subscription business model. Early signs are that people are more than willing to pay for this information.
The new title, which I hope thrives (they’re not a client), is part of Content 4.0.
Content 4.0, says Business Insider, is the rise of “Awesome to Many”, where technological advance and maturity of online culture combine to give content providers the opportunity to charge for these assets again.
I think that the Content 4.0 proposition is very strong and is still in process as an idea. But I agree that the online commercial landscape has changed fundamentally over the past few years.
The driver for that was Steve Jobs. Through iTunes, he made buying content online cool again. He then enabled this facility through the iPhone so mobile handsets became purchasing devices.
When buying through mobile becomes cool, the economics of the internet are transformed. We owe Steve Jobs a great debt.
We all love stories – and the narrative form is changing rapidly
November 1st, 2012
We all love stories, from the toddler joy of listening to our parents reading to us to an unexpected conversation in a pub.
We’ve learned to enjoy stories through mediums other than live speech – the book, magazine, film, TV show.
But maybe this is changing and we are moving back to a new form of oral transmission. At least that’s the argument put forward this week by Aleks Krotoski.
She is running an excellent series on BBC Radio 4 – Digital Human – which is well worth a catch-up if you haven’t followed it yet. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01nl671
Aleks Krotoski is one of the leading thinkers in the new generation of young broadcasters who focus on the cultural changes being driven by global networks and new technologies. This is her second Digital Human series.
This week, Aleks investigated the way that we tell stories in the digital age. Aleks talked to information specialists – author AS Byatt, Alison Norrington (one of the world’s leading proponents of transmedia stories), and Tom Pettitt (author of The Gutenberg Parenthesis) among others, to try to understand what a ‘story’ is for, before querying how modern online storytelling bears a striking resemblance to oral traditions of mediaeval times.
Many of the stories we tell, according to Aleks, currently do not make the most of what the digital world has to offer.
But there are examples of a new narrative form. The Slender Man, created by Victor Serge is a myth born and spread on the internet, and has gone global, far beyond the Anglophone countries. It is definitely worth checking out.
During the programme, AS Byatt said that stories are the essence of life and of time. They surround us and help us make sense of the world.
Tom Pettitt, who teaches English Literature at the University of Southern Denmark said that the current digital culture is in some ways reversing the Gutenberg revolution, returning the story to ‘the campfire’, picking up the oral tradition from where we left it in around 1600, with the introduction of movable type.
He believes that post-modern digital stories will resemble pre-modern stories.
Author Frank Rose echoed Professor Pettitt’s thoughts saying that the story is now freed from the constrictions of the book; it can be as long as you want; it can change and it can be split into two or more stories. It is also more than just text – you can use audio, video and images, for example, to narrate the tale. And it is interactive.
The power of narrative, or story-telling, should not be under-estimated. New forms of story-telling will only reinforce the focus on online content as a highly effective way to engage with others, whether new friends, colleagues, clients and customers.