My six guidelines / marketing trends have received a lot of positive feedback. As someone described it: “A very tangible and actionable list for digital marketing activities” – focusing on leveraging new consumer/media/digital trends.

As a result I wanted to publish it as an own slideshow, a small checklist or inspirational document in case anyone wanted to enjoy it, download it, print it or share it without all the other stuff in the original presentation surrounding it (and with an additional bonus guideline).

In addition to this I’m also thinking of doing the opposite – expanding it, into a more content rich presentation. Including more insights to create a bigger understanding of why each guideline is. And making it more tangible by presenting some known and lesser known examples proving each point.

Inspired by Godin, who said that in the future Amazon will act as a crowd sourced publisher, where if enough people list themselves as buyers of a future novel by a specific writer, Amazon will commission this novel, sell it and distribute it.

So what I am suggesting is that if enough people add a comment to this post, or send me a mention/tweet via @congbo. I will put together the larger presentation and hopefully create a piece of content that would be valuable too both colleagues and clients, planner and brands, marketers and executives.

I’m aiming for about 50 in total, so please comment or tweet if you want it all.

Online advertising will change fundamentally during the next year to four years. The reason is more unexpected, and with larger consequences, than anticipated.

I’ve written previously on how both the competition to the online ad product (ie. earned media) and our citizens’ change in online behavior should be forcing online media to innovate its advertising and marketing products. Now it seems these symptoms where only the tip of the iceberg: a change in the fundamental business model of the media industry.

In 2009 media has been failing, and it’s failing fast. All hands are on deck and the ability to think disruptively, not only incrementally, has invited people to rethink the whole structure of their business model. This will affect their income strategies and the companies sponsoring these income strategies.

In other words: online advertising is changing, because the media business model is changing.

This is the case I’m trying to make:
Media has been stuck for some time, but the scalability of the online advertising real estate, and the enormous market has kept the ball rolling. Not sensing that the drive for traffic and the drive for more ad space lessened the editorial product and made the media brands invisible.

As Kristin Skogen Lund, CEO of Aftenposten, one of the biggest newspapers in Norway said at a talk last week:

- ”We’ve been to identical, bought cheap traffic at a cost to our brand for to many years.” - Kristin Skogen Lund, CEO, Aftenposten

Scott Karp, editor of the Publishing 2.0 blog ads another argument:

“most newspaper websites sell SPACE for commodity advertising — display ads and classifieds — and thus are hard pressed to compete with ad networks that specialize in selling commodity ad space by the megaton” – Scott Karp, Publishing 2.0

The result is that the display advertising model works just fine for media buyers, but for brands they are receiving a decreasing amount of effect – and compared with the effect from earned media the investment at times can seem as a complete waste. At the same time media companies have brought a knife to a gunfight, they are competing against the networks, a game they can’t win, and are destroying their most valuable possession – their brand – along the way.

So something has got to change!

An incentive for change:
Two important facts where laid out by Skogen Lund at a conference last week:

- Only 5%
Skogen Lund stated that Aftenposten’s online revenue only represented 5% of their total revenue. Scott Karp confirms this as representative for the whole industry:

“That’s why the newspaper industry is worth about $60 billion offline but only $3 billion online — they only have about 5% of the pricing power that they did when there was only a finite amount of space in for printing ads.” – Scott Karp, Publishing 2.0

Online advertising in it’s current form is not a big revenue model for media companies, which would incentives innovation. If only one believed that online customers where better customers… Are people worse customers online? Hardly, FEED: The Razorfish Digital Brand Experience Report / 2009 states:

“Brands that use digital to drive awareness also drives sales: 64% of consumers report making a first purchase from a brand because of a digital experience” – FEED 09

So there is nothing wrong with the platform, there is nothing wrong with online, it’s how we’ve utilized it for advertising, and as a business model, that has been completely of the mark.

- Advertising decreasing, subscriptions increasing
A second interesting fact presented by Skogen Lund was a graph showing how advertising has represented a sharp decline in revenue, while subscriptions a sharp increase this last year. This at the same time as we are seeing niche newspapers, with strong brands and identifiable products, increasing their subscriptions in contrary to the mainstream newspapers which are declining. This tells us that there is an interest in a strong media product, and people are willing to pay for it.

My conclusion is this:
Media is a product (a membership), has always been a product and will continue to be a product. But somewhere along the way someone found that sponsoring it with advertising was a god idea. (Brilliant video for Norwegian readers to be found here (Thx. Freddy)). Which it was, to some extent. But the consequence was that the drive for traffic became more important than building a strong brand and a unique product.

Today when advertising sponsorship is failing as a business model, media has to start charging for something. But since they are left with a generic product it is impossible to charge for content that can be found for free ten other places.

(which is probably why Murdoch is shutting out Google, and also the argument of Mathias Dophner here. They want to protect it before they create it.)

So I anticipate that blood will continue to flow in the Media industry – because there is not enough money to finance all these institutions, and there is not enough strong brands to charge for their product.

Which leaves us with advertising: Advertising online will change because the media business model will change. Media brands seeing that they either don’t need to garbage their stories with competing stories, as Scott Karp says:

“advertising isn’t more valuable when placed next to premium content because display advertising has so LITTLE value to begin with. In fact, display advertising creates so little consumer value that it actually SUBTRACTS value from high quality editorial content when placed next it.”

Or because they find that people reading their publications are there because they get provided a value, and that brands in a lot of instances can co-produce this value. That NEW BRANDS are value creators, and that NEW MARKETING IDEAS are about creating additional value – not a competition between the attention of stories. And that this value, and a relationship built on trust between the media, the brand and the participant, will create a new, valuable, membership based content system.

That brands, as Forrester already has anticipated, will sponsor niche arenas where they can build direct relationships with their participants and members. What these arenas are, how large, small, niche or commercial, content, conversation or context based is completely up to our own imagination and creativity.

Presenting at the iab Interact 2009 in Amsterdam at the end of November, I have been asked to talk about new marketing under the theme of the conference: “It’s the people stupid”.

As my bio states:

“…As technology becomes invisible, the opportunity for companies to connect with participants arises from its understanding of its fundamental ability to ad value to situations in a persons life.”

The presentation tries to identify the difference between traditional attention based advertising (company centric) and new marketing (human centric). Proposing some challenges/opportunities regarding the former and exploring some of the major mindset changes regarding the latter.

The big idea being a continuation of one of my earlier presentations: That marketing becomes the product, adding additional value, eclipsing it and making it unique.

Marketing being the value provider and products being invitations to next generation memberships and subscription models

Mobile is at the forefront of representing a completely new way of thinking about marketing.

But in order to understand this we need to look beyond the SMS and the text voting, and start exploring the real potential of the platform.

Since the Mobile Abilities Map pdf, published two weeks ago, has received a great deal of interest. I thought it would be a good resource to readers if I collected and published my inspiration and ideas to each topic. Hopefully getting some inspirational juice flowing.

- I’ve added links to each resource on slides where this was possible.

I hope people appreciate the presentation, and continue sharing great links on their own blogs (and link back here) or in the comments section on this blog.

Every traditional marketing campaign is a customer purchase, that is no revelation: ROI and CPC, CPM, CPA are all standards. But I suggest there is something wrong with that mindset. In fact, with the uncertainty of the future of media, everything might be wrong with that mindset.

Display advertising might still be around at the end of 2010, but what is the gain from buying 30 seconds from about 0,001% of viewers when your competition is racking up thousands of engaged participants and members?

This is not an argument against the format, it’s not the format that’s the problem. Its the alternatives, the future of media, and your competition.

(And the reason I’m saying end of 2010 is because media is changing, FAST, including their business model. And the outcome is highly uncertain.)

There is one more thing, of great importance and huge interest:

People will gladly spend a minute of their day composing and publishing their own version of the brand story, but they won’t give five seconds of their time to listen to the company tell their version of it.

I’ve put together a list for 2009/2010:

1. People talk. They don’t want to be interrupted, but they do want their conversations to be ignited and more valuable.

2. Earned media is becoming more and more important in the mechanics of the marketing eco-system. People don’t share stuff because they notice it, they share stuff because it’s valuable.

3. People are not on one platform, they switch between several – all the time. Only people building things for platforms care about platforms. Our activities need to give the participant the opportunity to choose how and where to participate.

4. People will share their version of a brand’s story with other people, but they don’t care to listen to the brand’s own story.

5. People are more valuable owning and using your product than thinking about buying it.

6. In the words of Kevin Slavin: “People will watch a TV program once, maybe twice, but they will play chess an hundred or maybe a thousand times”. Where would you grow your most important relationships?

There has been some local frustration regarding the lack of ambitions on the future of mobile marketing. I’ve been part taking in some discussions and the focus seems to be on fitting mobile into the old traditional marketing model mindset. In my opinion this is looking at the opportunities from the completely wrong angle – mobile has got nothing to do with traditional marketing.

Which turned out to be a great reason to put together a mind map focusing on the twelve most important aspects of mobile marketing – in my mind:

Find a larger version available on flickr.

This is a list of the twelve abilities, and I’ve added some links to some of the points:

- GEOTILITY AND SPIMES: Devices responsive to geolocation and time.
- Bruce Sterling, The Internet of things: What is a spime and why is it useful?

- SENSE / RECORD: The beauty of digital is its ability to record anything – as it is happening. The mobile becomes a huge sensing device.

- EVERYDAY LIFE: The PC is inaccessible in almost all situations where the brand is relevant. Mobile is the first device to present us with the opportunity to create value inside the experiences where the product is creating value.

- Context, Value & The New Marketing Economy

- DESIGN: The GUI has to be designed to invite people in, and facilitate the activity.

- The Astonishing Tribe YouTube Channel

- GAMING: Never underestimate the power of gaming activities.

- MTV Backchannel

- ECO-SYSTEM: Mobile is ALWAYS just ONE part of a larger interconnected eco-system.

- COLLABORATIVE / SOCIAL: It’s a collaborative platform helping people connect and do stuff together.

- Charles Leadbeater and Clay Shirky on Creative Collaboration

- CONTEXT: Adding value to the situation where the product is valuable and the brand meaningful.

- When Marketing Becomes The Product

- OBJECTS: The mobile is just the thing stuff talks to.

- Matt Jones: Webstock 2009
- Kevin Slavin: This platform called everyday life

- VALUE CHAIN: Tracing participant action from A to Z.

- CHESS: People watch a TV-program once, maybe twice. But they can play Chess a thousand times.

- Kevin Slavin, 5D Conference: TV as an Event

- REMOTE CONTROL: When the device interacts with the surroundings – on the participants behalf.

Nearness by Timo Arnall and Berg

As technology immerses into our daily life and disappears, value based marketing becomes available through new behaviors, inside situations where it is meaningful and useful.

This turns marketing into the experience surrounding the product – and in some instances becomes the experience people connect to and build relationships with. The marketing becomes the product, and the product becomes the marketing.

This is a presentation held for a class of students in electronic business development at BI, in Oslo Norway.

Availability can not be underestimated, two reasons for this:

1. First, a minor mindset thing:
People want to choose their own arenas, not be forced into one because the company finds it sufficient to only make their stuff available in one place.

2. Then the bigger thing:
The missing link between something being a tool and something changing our behavior is its availability (link):

Clay Shirky’s famous quote:
“A revolution doesn’t happen when society adopts new tools, it happens when society adopts new behaviors” – Clay Shirky, Us Now

Which, linked with availability, in a tools and services perspective could give this:

“The goal would be to make the service so easily available that it as a technology becomes invisible but contextually becomes valuable.” – Bridging the gap between technology and behavior

Pushing Shirky a bit, we could say that technology is tools, but services are behaviors. And that tools only become valuable services as they are made available within the context where the person naturally adopts them.

- That in order for people to adopt something within their everyday life, it has to be designed based on human and contextual abilities, not just to fit into technological or informational frameworks.

- Or, that publishing stuff only gives people new tools, but if we make sure the stuff becomes available to the point of becoming invisible it will change peoples behaviors in the situation surrounding the product – and that is the interesting shift when marketing stops demanding exclusive attention and starts becoming valuable (which means shareable).

Which, if I’m right, would also be very close to this; Purple Cow, and this, Baked In.

Now there are two types of availability:

1. Being where the niche is (Jonathan MacDonald). The old saying that everything is only one click away on the Internet is outdated. Today, hiding stuff away behind walls of technology or website cartography is as good as not publishing it at all. We have to make the stuff available so that different people in different contexts find their “natural” way to engage with it and become a part of it. (Tim Brown)

2. Design. At a seminar two years ago the brilliant people at TAT presented some insights into the fact that the visual presentation layers has to be tailored to the activity we want the participant to perform – not the economical preconditions of the technological framework. That design is one very important part of a service’s availability, and should not be underestimated.

(Also supported by Michal Tchao, presenting Nike+ at Picnic08: These things already existed, but we designed it in a whole new way, so that people were able to use it.)

This is what I’m trying to say: Just because the stuff is available on a companies website doesn’t mean people will find it or use it. It needs to become available on platforms and arenas that fit into peoples everyday life. Which means that we need to fragment our marketing much more (“light lots of small fires” – Mark Earls), and tailor it to fit into the participant-product context.

Understanding the challenges affecting digital media as a marketing platform introduces some new creative challenges. What we are seeing is very solvable, and they are triggering the start of a much more diverse and interesting time for marketing and advertising.

There are four main challenges disturbing the effect of marketing investments on digital media [DM]. Understanding their abilities, and why they are doing a much better job than DM on doing what DM originally did gives insight into what DM needs to offer in order to regain its value. (Sorry about all the DM’s :o)

The important thing is not to copy these abilities, because that would not be bettering digital media, it would be destroying it. We need to find the solutions within the context of the existing value creation of the digital media body. And this is where it introduces some great creative challenges for strategists and creatives.

The four horsemen in this case can seem very threatening; on the other hand, sometimes innovation needs to be forced by inescapable realities.

The Four Horsemen:

1. Earned media. We are increasingly seeing earned media outperform paid media and becoming the main driver of traffic to marketing initiatives.

2. Middle men. Media needs to build down the barriers between brands and participants online, today the artificial divide media offers are lessening the value compared to brands own initiatives.

3. New behaviors. Increased accessibility to tools and technology not only boosts media consumption, but also changes how the use integrates into our daily lives. Advertising models tailored for a more traditional media consumption looses effectiveness.

4. Brands as competitors. The competition is no longer between digital media channels with similar products; it’s between media channels and the brands own initiatives.

Looking at the larger picture there are already two visible solutions:

1. Media channels need to offer arenas where brands with shared values can build direct relations with the participants through offering deliberate and relevant value over time.

2. Exploring and understanding Media’s new role in online activities – defined by its abilities. And build products that fit better to this part of the online marketing eco-system, or create a new role all together.

Lets look at the horsemen, where are the opportunities?

1. Earned Media, this is simple. Earned media is earned, which means it finds and links to stuff that is valuable. (In effect this isn’t relevant to any advertising campaign that people don’t want to share. On the other hand…). If the advertising is valuable, then the media channel needs to offer the space for where the content resides. If brands build stuff on media channels that earned media links back to, you create a win-win situation. Simple :o)

2. Middle Men, a bit more complex. Media needs to get out of the way. At the same time they need their presence as they are dependent on not becoming invisible themselves. This creates a situation where brands and media need to collaborate. We already know that both brands and media channels are value providers, and it is the interfaces where they create shared value we are looking for. Media opens to such a collaborative opportunity through its development of arenas specially tailored to niche interest and niche brands.

3. New behaviors. Increased accessibility to information-, media-, and social technology first changes our tools, then our behaviors. What we are seeing now are people not only changing how much time they spend with media channels, but also how they use them. The jury is out on this one as the changes in behavior have just started, but both Transmedia, synchronized media activities across platforms and content enrichment through participation carries some very promising and clever inspiration.

4. Brands are the new competitors. As brands can create their own media channels and direct relations arenas, the need to use media as a vehicle for messaging decreases. This means that the competition for marketing dollars is not exclusively between the media channels but between the media channels and the brands own initiatives. What media needs to do is both understand how they can facilitate and increase the value of these arenas, by offering a new property tailored to each brands initiative. Top of mind this might be “free” traffic, but better and more unique values will be more connected to synergies gained from shared values.

Summarizing this into seven simple bullet points, digital media needs to do the following:

1. Start seeing themselves as value providers, not content providers.
2. Understand that advertising moves from just being messaging to becoming something useful and valuable.
3. Start selling long-term initiatives, helping brands build direct relations with people, and connect with them over time.
4. Produce content that is stealable and multipliable.
5. Build a portfolio of unique values – not unique content or formats.
6. Offer clear values as a part of a marketing eco-system, facilitate larger parts of this system.
7. And finally, offer brands marketing abilities that they are unable to offer themselves.

Display advertising was designed to work inside a traditional media format, tailored to a certain context of media use. As this use-context changes with the accessibility of new technology – as readers become participants, as media gets integrated into everyday life and exported outside the browser – these formats don’t fit the context anymore and start to loose their effectiveness.

This is similar to saying “digital didn’t change anything, but everything digital changed”. Because with the advent of the Internet (before broadband) the old models didn’t really change that much, they just got digitalized –the use pattern stayed the same (looking at use statistics we see that the older the citizen the more similar their use of digital media is to traditional media). What we are seeing now is the alteration of the core concepts of the use part – which has a much greater effect on media and advertising than just moving some stuff from one platform to the other.

Regarding click-rates on online banners we’ve moved from being told a 0,15% click average is good to a 0.05%. This isn’t necessarily because we’ve got lower expectations. It might just be because the average drops – because the advertising formats aren’t following the changes in consumption patterns.

Now we are very busy measuring the amount of media consumption, and supporters point to every research showing an increase. But this only points to the amount of media consumed, not the pattern of the consumption – and this is where stuff has changed…

In other words, there is a new context for using media, and measuring how much we use it isn’t helpful as it isn’t relevant. What is useful is understanding how the use has changed, and figuring out how this should change media – and its advertising..