I am Zlatan, storytelling concept

March 6th, 2012

Zlatan Ibrahimovic is a well-known footballer who currently plays for AC Milan in Italy, and is the star of the Swedish national side.

He has recently launched his own app called I am Zlatan, which chronicles his football career to date, based on his autobiography. The content is very interactive, and photos come to life with links to YouTube videos to refer to past achievements.

This is a great way of storytelling. Check out the video to see the app in action.

Concept video: I Am Zlatan Biography App from Bonnier on Vimeo.

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A two and a half men stunt!

February 28th, 2012

Ashton Hayes in Cheshire has certainly been put on the map, after it was renamed ‘Ashton Kutcher’ after the Hollywood actor. Ashton under Hill in Worcestershire, Ashton in south Northamptonshire and finally Ashton Keynes in Wiltshire were also renamed Ashton Kutcher for two days this week as well.

The village takeovers were the idea of TV channel Comedy Central, as a PR stunt to promote the hit series Two And A Half Men, in which Ashton Kutcher stars.

Bill Griffin, from Comedy Central said: ‘It seems the UK has been gripped by a kind of mania for Ashton Kutcher. The stunt was genuinely meant in good humour and if any of the locals were amused, bemused or in any way inconvenienced I’ll buy them a drink at the Ashton Kutcher Arms’.

Ashton Village Takeover. from Bang Boom Creative on Vimeo.

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The Fifth Wave strategic vision for mobile

February 27th, 2012

Robert Marcus and Collins Hemingway appear to know their shtick. They have just published an account of where we are going online and what this means.

The Fifth Wave: A Strategic Vision for Mobile Internet Innovation, Investment and Return was released today at Mobile World Congress 2012.

It blows part of the mind, i.e, it’s really quite interesting, while it makes an informative case for us as we move through 2012-13, with the old economic order dissolving and the new struggling to take first breath.

I’d argue with Marcus and Hemingway on the creation of new value, which they position as deriving from opportunity. This is a superficial view to my mind and they need to look much deeper into value creation to make their case work.

Opportunity is just a secondary reflection of the market condition. The value is created in the primary area.

This is a strong account of where we are going in mobile and through our network. It needs a second read and report back.

Robert Marcus led a keynote and panel during the opening session today (February 27^th) of the Mobile World Congress conference session on Mobile Cloud. You can get more info on MWC here.

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When Larry met Sergey is more than just an infographic

February 22nd, 2012

The Google story is a fascinating one, and one that I have personally followed very closely. A great way of finding out more about how Google started, way back in 1995, and its journey to success since then, is the embeddable Evolution of Google timeline aka When Larry met Sergey.

When Larry met Sergey is a creative infographic that actually made me stop and read the facts highlighted throughout, which include such gems as:

“Google implements industrial shipping containers to house their servers, each containing 1,160, for an estimated total of 200,000. Each is powered by Intel and AMD x86 processors and comes with an integrated 12-volt battery in case of failure”.

My favourite aspect is the fact that when you scroll down through the years, you get an ever increasing update on the number of Google users and the number of employees working for the company. In 2011 that figure stood at 2,100,000,000 web users, 31,353 employees with a current net income of $7,032,000,000 (in quarters 1 through 3). Not bad for 16 years work!

If that isn’t enough, there is a link to a list of sources found on the bottom right hand corner of the timeline, encouraging you to dig even deeper into the the world of Google.

So what does the future hold for Google? Will people begin to move away? Will the likes of Bing, Facebook and Twitter halt Google’s progression? Please let us know your thoughts in the comments section of this blog.

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The Howling Football Campaign

February 21st, 2012

There are two huge sports-related events in the summer, the London Olympics being one, and the other is the European Football Championship hosted in Poland and the Ukraine. This post will focus on the latter.

A German non-governmental organisation has created the video shown below to raise awareness for a so-called “street cleaning programme”. Apparently street dogs and cats are being removed (exterminated) from the streets of the Ukraine to make the country “cleaner” in preparation for the expected mass of football fans.

The video is very well shot and certainly grabs attention. The sound of the ball howling when kicked is very haunting indeed.

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Mobile World Congress promises surprises

February 20th, 2012

With a week to go before the Mobile World Congress starts in Barcelona, the number of pre-show announcements is growing rapidly.

It’s interesting to see that Firefox developer Mozilla plans to announce partners for its Boot to Gecko (B2G) project, a browser-based operating system for mobile devices. Mobile network operators are pretty certain to show strong support for this, offering as it does, the potential for new revenue streams.

Google, which stands to lose ground in mobile if B2G gains traction in the market space, is building a strong presence for Android at MWC so we can expect some good hooks.

Samsung has pulled back on the promotion of its new Galaxy handset, which was a surprise to many – but not the company apparently. However, I hope the innovative vendor will be a strong presence at MWC and that some of the rumours around its Android tablets bear fruit.

As we all pretty much know now – Apple does not do trade shows and so will not be gracing the Barcelona show. No need for them to find out more here, then.

Isn’t it also really great that we can finally ditch the annual phrase “This is the Year of Mobile”?

The show runs from Monday February 27^th to Thursday March 1^st.

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Are we really still talking about PR vs search vs social?

February 17th, 2012

Warning: rant coming…

First of all, this is not meant to be an attack on the recent post, titled ‘PR Agencies: Adapt or Die‘, on the Forrester blog. It made some good points, but it was also the spark that re-ignited my ongoing frustration with the industry that perpetuates this ‘x vs Y approach’, or ‘we’re better at it than you’ nonsense, which in my opinion misses the point entirely.

Yes, the traditional PR agency needs to adapt, and the same has been said for many years. The smart ones already have, and the others, well…they are slowly learning why they should.

In that time the search agency became all powerful, then became a digital agency and is now trying to redefine itself, and it’s a similar tale across the industry.

The reality for PR agencies, social agencies, digital agencies, search agencies and the vast majority of agencies, is that simply offering one element of a much wider remit of brand communications is not enough.

You cannot expect to live by one skill alone any more, and it’s pretty clear that brands are not willing to pay five agencies to do five roles that one should really be able to accomplish. Is it too much to ask that brand communicators should be able to establish emotional connections with customers, without the client needing to worry about where each level of service implementation comes from?

Some may argue that mobile is a specialism and one worth maintaining outside of the brand communications sphere of skills, and although it could be argued that is true for now, it was true of search and social at one time. Therefore, the simple truth is we as consumers absorb media quickly, and expect our services, brands and conversations to be cross-media very quickly, so why shouldn’t we expect the same of our agencies?

Getting back to my point, the issue is not about whether PR lives or dies, in its traditional form it has been struggling for 10 years. Search is losing its slice of the pie as skills go in-house and revenues tumble, and social agencies need to up-skill across the board to remain competitive, or risk being stranded as a specialist. So the issue is not so much who will win, but what will win.

By what, I mean that the agency of the future is not search or social or PR or even advertising. It’s more likely to be earned or paid media, and even earned and paid. This agency, let’s call it simply a brand communications agency (although I realise that has negative connotations traditionally) can do all of the above. This agency will be the winner, and yes that will upset many business models and eat into carefully laid profit plans, but that is the reality I see, and I don’t mean this agency will need to hold all skills in-house.

So yes, PR agencies as a general rule don’t do digital very well, this is not news, but it’s what PR, social, search and digital will become that is much more interesting.

Finally, a note to our regular readers. My apologies if you have seen this same rant in 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 and now 2012, it seems change takes time.

Posted in Blog, Blogging, Content, Digital communications, PR, Social media, Useful resources | 1 Comment »

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Shortcut to replace QR Codes?

February 14th, 2012

QR codes are everywhere at the moment, but a Swiss company called Kooaba offers an alternative. Kooaba want to replace QR Codes with a mobile app called Shortcut, formerly known as Paperboy.

So why use Shortcut?

Kooaba’s Tom Desmet says in a blog post “Despite the enormous media attention QR is getting, it still is not at a level where people are really using it. It does not seem to fit into peoples daily routine. Besides that, we have also seen a lot of misplaced QR codes, and many mistakes like codes in magazines that are too small to scan… for print and outdoor advertising, it is simply not needed.

“Interactive print advertising is going to play a bigger role in the future. Using Shortcut, you will get access to the most interesting deals and extras on your mobile phone by taking a picture of ads and billboards with the shortcut icon.”

See Shortcut in action:

For more information, downloads, and a list of all the supported print titles visit our new Shortcut website.

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Another RIM #fail?

February 8th, 2012

The recent RIM BeBold Twitter campaign started well enough, but did it eventually #fail? I’ll let you decide!

RIM asked users to tweet their resolutions for the New Year, using the hashtag #BeBold. The initial start to the campaign received a good response, however it didn’t end so well.

The campaign closed with an infographic “The Bold Team” in which RIM unveiled four cartoon characters designed to reflect the main themes featured in the resolutions – Achievers, Adventurers, Advocates and Authentics.

Unfortunately for RIM this went down like a lead balloon. One tweeter writing: “The BlackBerry new #BeBold campaign is really, really cringeworthy. Dated characters and painfully bad copy. They should just die gracefully.” The Huffington post Canada tweeted ”RIM when we suggested you #beBold with your business strategy this is not what we had in mind”

This was RIM’s response.

We’ve noticed The BeBold Team has received a lot of attention over the last couple of days, and wanted to clarify – this infographic is just intended to be a bit of fun. On New Year’s Eve, we asked BlackBerry Twitter followers and their friends to submit their resolutions on how they plan to Be Bold in 2012. More than 35,000 resolutions streamed across Twitter, Facebook, and giant billboards in Times Square. As we looked at the resolutions and the data, majority patterns and categories emerged. We decided to organize the data and share it in a fun way, and the result is the infographic. This is not a new ad campaign.”

You can find the notorious infographic here. We would love to hear what you think about it.

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Facebook users bring in 10 times less cash than traditional media users

February 8th, 2012

An excellent article in Guardian’s Monday Note caught my attention earlier this week, titled ‘Facebook’s strange economics‘

The piece, written by Frédéric Filloux compared Facebook’s valuation 3 years ago, with its valuation now and pulled up some interesting data on its profit and value per user, then compared this to other social and traditional media.

The article set the scene with a snapshot of a Marc Andreessen interview, from February 2009, who was the creator of Netscape and a Facebook board member. At that time, the social network had 175 million users and Microsoft had just made an investment setting Facebook’s valuation at $15bn.

Andreessen was quoted on the vision for Facebook, saying: “6 billion people on the planet. Probably 3 billion of them with modern electricity and maybe telephones. So maybe the total addressable market today is 3 billion people. 175 million to 3 billion is a big challenge. A big opportunity.”

I’m sure there were a few raised eyebrows in 2009, but perhaps his statement is a little more believable today, although there are other issues such as strong competition in key markets, the member opportunity is indeed there.

Fast forward to last year (2011) when Andreessen was quoted commenting on Facebook’s funding ($1.3bn as of January 2011). Andreessen said the whole amount was actually a shrewd investment as it translated into an acquisition cost of “one or two dollars per user” ($1.53), which sounded perfectly acceptable to him.

As Filloux mentions in the article, if you look at Facebook’s pre-iPO filing: Marc Andreessen was right both in 2009 and in 2011.

So why the title of ‘Facebook’s strange economics?‘ Well, this is where it gets interesting.

As Filloux points out, last year, each of the 845 million active members on Facebook brought in $4.39 in revenue and $1.18 in net income. He also pointed out that based on the $3.9bn in cash and marketable securities on Facebook’s balance sheet, each of these users actually generated a cash input of $1.53 dollars.

The article then suggests the expected market value for each user after the IPO, which is based on the $100bn valuation, comes out at a value of $118 per user.

Filloux then goes on to compare this to other social networks and more traditional media.

Looking at LinkedIn, which is obviously more specialised than Facebook, and has about 145 million users, it has a $7.7bn market cap and a value of $57 per user. However, LinkedIn makes $3.5 in revenue and $0.78 in profit.

The New York Times, until recently the most read online newspaper in the world, is a less straight forward case, as Filloux notes, simply because the company has numerous websites that deal with domestic and global users as well as traditional readers of multiple hardcopy titles.

Filloux suggested a figure of 50 million people worldwide who are in regular contact with one of NYT’s titles. Based on today’s $1.14bn market cap, this yields a valuation of $23 per NYT customer, five times less than Facebook.

However, there is a large anomaly because in 2011, each NYT customer brought $46 in revenue, almost 10 times more than Facebook. As for the profit ($56m for the NYT), each customer brought in a little more than a dollar.

Looking at traditional media company Gannett, Filloux noted it makes between $50 and $80 per year in revenue per customer, and, depending on the way you estimate it, the market values that customer at about $50.

This means Facebook or LinkedIn are flying high while traditional media are struggling; when Facebook achieves a 47% profit margin, Gannett or News Corp are in the 10% range.

This in no surprise in terms of the way social media are over taking traditional media, but the value per user is much lower. 10 times lower in fact, but the market values these users up to five times more.

Bringing this in to context, Facebook looks set to offer shares a multiple of 100 times its earning and 25 times its revenue. Apple is worth 13 times its earnings and Google 20 times. These kinds of figures do not tend to stand the test of time very well when the market matures, so beware of the Facebook Bubble as Filloux puts it.

The article offers real clarity on what has been one of the most dramatic valuations since the dotcom boom. Facebook’s success is undeniable and its meteoric rise to success/power is there for all to see, but surely the valuation is generous to a fault. Or too generous not to fault.

I have no doubt Facebook’s IPO will be a massive success, and the future of the organisation is bright, but why do we need to make a success story into a super success with falsely inflated valuations, when the real story is still pretty damn impressive?

Posted in Blog, Digital communications, Digital media, Journalism, Liberate Media news, Trends and research, Useful resources | 3 Comments »

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