Don at work by abbey*christine, via Flickr

Author: Matthew Kershaw, Content Director, BBH London

I talked here yesterday about a near future in which TV advertising would become fully targetted, completely measurable and highly interactive.

So what are the implications of this prediction for agencies?

Without getting all Harold Camping on you, here are five things I believe agencies should do to craft the advertising of the future:

1. Be action oriented not message oriented

The briefs we gave teams historically were geared around message – what did we want to say to consumers?

Nowadays, this has evolved to discussions which treat communications as a product to be shared, remixed, commented upon. (BBH briefs ask, “Why are the target going to want to seek this idea out, spend time with it or share it?”)

But beyond this, the new landscape will require us all to think about, in a much broader sense, what action we want the viewer to take. For sure, it will be a simple, light action that they can take there and then, rather than anything complex or time-consuming. Viewers are in on-sofa lean-back mode after all.

But nevertheless, the ‘light action’ can be pretty broad:

You get the idea. Bookmarking is interesting because there is often latent interest in a product or service in an ad, but not to the degree that you want to stop watching your  favourite show. The ability to ‘save it for later’ seems very appealing (this is born out by work done by Thinkbox).

‘Add to basket’ is also interesting because it has the power to disrupt the relationship between product and retailer, giving advertisers the ability to drive viewers straight from TV to supermarket.

2. Bring sales closer to advertising

Talking of actions, the most important action to most advertisers is the decision to ‘buy’.

The road to ‘t-commerce’ is littered with failures. And you can see why. Imagine inputting all this on your TV using a remote control. Nightmare.

People don’t want to be taken away from the programme to a simple voting interface, much less a complicated e-commerce journey. But luckily, in this new connected era, people on the sofa are interacting with the shared screen using their phone, tablet etc as the management tool.

Linking the incredible motivating power of TV with the ability to buy there and then could be the single biggest change in the advertising model since – well, since the introduction of TV advertising itself. The process by which a consumer becomes aware of a product through advertising, decides to purchase, goes in store to buy the product and then becomes an evangelist might have taken a number of weeks or months in the past.

Now, the whole process can theoretically be compressed into a matter of minutes.

3. Love Data

And, as that buying process compresses, so advertisers will become less interested in the fact that x million people had the ‘opportunity to view the ad’, or what a bunch of people in a focus group said sometime later about their brand.

Instead they will increasingly measure the success of their campaigns by the response they get right there and then, on the spot.

One consequence of this is that understanding and analysing consumer responses, and ever more complex results and tracking will be vital. Especially if it helps you understand better which of your creative is having the best impact. It will determine what contribution your agency is making to ‘the final click’ as opposed to all those other agencies.

If you’re not already, time to start building your data offering.

4. Prepare for a world targetted and varied

In a world where TV ads can be targetted, clients need multiple variants of the ads tailored to different audiences. Agencies need to consider multiplicity in their strategy, which has important implications for the production process. We need to do more for less. Big clients like Unilever are already starting to decouple the production side of what agencies do to get economies of scale. The pressures that all agencies are facing at the moment will only be exacerbated by this internet-ising of television.

5. Be always on

Tracking instant, real-time results inevitably means instant real-time copy changes and tweaks. For ad agencies, this requires analysts who are ready to set up and manage this information. And, as mentioned, a production process that allow for constant, on-the-spot-changes and A/B testing.

In summary

TV is changing due to increased targeting by broadcasters, and – as viewers themselves are more connected – more social activity around TV content. The impact of this is that TV advertising will to become more like advertising on the internet, more measurable and interactive.

One fear is that this will channel creativity into a singular expression, “so is advertising going to be purely about direct marketing techniques from now on?” one colleague asked me.

I hope that isn’t case.

Standing out in an ever-busier media landscape will rely more than ever on creativity. But what I also hope will happen is that as the advertising gets closer to the sale – the moment of truth –  agencies will start to have a broader commercial remit. Something which can only help increase our relevance to our clients.

There is a scene at the end of Series 2 of Madmen where Don Draper fights it out with Duck over the future of Sterling Cooper. Don wins the day with his line “I don’t sell advertising, I sell products”.

Connected TV potentially offers the power to sell products to an unheard of degree.

It’s what Don would have wanted.

TV stencil by USB, via Flickr

Author: Matthew Kershaw (@mattski2000), Content Director, BBH London

There is a frothy bubble of excitement growing around the future of Connected TV.

At CES back in January, it was announced that the connected TV category is forecast to ship over 123 million connected TVs  a year by 2014. With overall ownership to reach 1 billion by 2015.

Just this month,  Philips announced that they have 1 million active Net TV users.

And all the major players are piling in: Google are still behind Google TV, YouView are finally preparing to launch with the ultimate boss, Lord Sugar, Virgin have just launched their Tivo service, Sony made a commitment early and even Apple are still just about in the game with their AppleTV device. And then there’s Anthony Rose, the genius behind the  BBC iPlayer and ex CTO of YouView, now championing two-screen interaction.

With all this hype and excitement, you’d think that us ad folk would be talking about nothing else, combining as it does ad land’s two big obsessions: the power of television and the interactivity of the internet.

So why are we holding back?

Is it just a hangover from the ‘red button’ experiment? Or perhaps, having got on board with the message that ‘TV is dying! The internet’s the future!’, combining both of them is just too big a step to get our heads around.

There is certainly a problem with the way it’s being sold to us.

Since its inception, television has had a delightfully simple and focused proposition: you turn the box on and you are pushed rich, engaging video content. If you’re bored, you can change channel and watch something else.

Recent developments like Sky+, HD, 3D and especially video-on-demand are all effectively enhancements of the same principle. TV, but better (or more convenient).

Too often though, the way Connected TV is marketed obscures and complicates all that is great about TV.

It gets in the way of the video content; displaying a bunch of stuff over the programming. Or worse, turns what should be a shared screen into a one-viewer experience.

I wonder whether people really want to get a Twitter stream cluttering up their TV screen. Or surf Facebook. Or get the weather. Particularly when there are better screens available to do it on.

But don’t get me wrong, underlying all of this there are two incredibly exciting developments in the world of TV. One is being spontaneously driven by audiences, in a completely uncontrolled way.  The other, in complete reverse, is being created by The Man, the conglomerates who control television.

The first is that, without any official prompting, people are grabbing their smartphones, laptops and iPads and using them to interact with the TV to unheard of levels:

• 42% of American consumers surf the internet while watching the television (Deloitte)
• 86% of US mobile Internet users are using their mobile devices at the same time as watching TV (Yahoo!/Nielsen)
• 72% of under-25 mobile internet users in the UK post comments on TV shows using Twitter, and 56% do it on Facebook (Digital Clarity)

So people definitely want to interact with their TV – they just don’t necessarily want to do it through their TV.

In other words:

It’s not about people watching connected TV.

It’s about connected people watching TV.

At the same time as viewers are spontaneously socialising around TV, the powers that be are also adding some extraordinary technology, using broadcast infrastructure to do incredible things.

Broadcasters like Sky, Cablevision and DirectTV are all on the verge of being able to play out targeted advertising using demographic data they hold on their customers.

We’re talking here about proper TV ad breaks, targetted at specific households.

Taken to its extreme, in this new world, the Royal Household might think that the new face of Robinsons is Sophie Dahl while the rest of us get Stacey Solomon.

Or while we’re getting adverts for the Audi A1 (on-the-road price £13,950)  the Abramovich family see adverts for the Audi R8, (on-the-road price £87,350).

Put simply, all the behaviours that currently accompany advertising on the web are going to be brought across to TV advertising:

• The formats, the measurement and analysis
• The real-time changing of copy and iterative approach to creative
• The laser-like focus on ROI and direct response

In other words TV advertising is about to become; fully targeted, completely measurable and highly interactive.

It’s like the Brian Cox of advertising. The rock and roll of his ex-band D:Ream married to a career as a theoretical astrophysicist. And everyone loves Brian Cox, don’t they?

And that my friends is a revolution. It’s the future we’ve all been promised. The winners will be those who can change how they plan, create and produce their output to engage with consumers in this new world.

So what does this mean for agencies specifically? More on that in the next instalment, which will be about five actions creative agencies need to take to contend with the TV of the future.

The digital landscape across Asia-Pacific has seen significant change in recent months, with enthusiasm for social media driving the broader adoption of a wide range of connected services and tools.

Although Internet penetration levels remain low in many Asian countries, the sheer size of those countries’ populations means that the numbers must be seen in context; for example, internet penetration in China stands at just 34%, but the number of social media users in that country exceeds the total population of Russia.

It’s also critical to understand how people in the East access and use the web.

We know mobile phones are already an indispensable part of life throughout Asia, and given the faltering state of infrastructure in much of the region, these are often the predominant means of communication and entertainment. Digging into the latest numbers still has the power to give us pause for thought, however. In India, for example, Mobile penetration is 50% higher than TV penetration.

As a consequence, the Asian internet revolution is skipping a step, with many people accessing the web and web-powered utilities uniquely through mobile devices.

In many Asian countries, this entails access via basic ‘feature’ phones (i.e. non-smartphones), but as in so many other areas, Asians approach these devices with a remarkable sense of resourcefulness. Simple apps and hacks for social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and their local equivalents abound, and this simplified access is helping to fuel astonishing adoption rates across the region.

Importantly, many tracking studies miss this mobile-only behaviour – a reality borne out by the fact that the number of Facebook users in Indonesia appears to exceed the total number of internet users.

To help make sense of all this data and the broader Asian picture, BBH Asia-Pacific has been profiling the digital, mobile, and social media landscapes of a number of countries around the region.

You can see the latest China report above, while reports on India, South-East Asia, Indonesia and the Philippines are all available to view and download via SlideShare here.

For more info on any of these reports, please leave a comment here or get in touch (@eskimon).

The most provoking part of the presentation is the Disruptive Innovation slide. PSFK had a great blurb on describing the importance of this theory:

Disruptive Innovation is what’s to blame for the success of smaller, nimbler but sometimes cheaper products or services that manage to disrupt the success or complacency of larger, traditional brand players. Think of Amazon’s continued growth and eventual ‘breaking’ of Barnes & Noble, or Netflix’s killing of Blockbuster. Meeker’s presentation lays out two ways in which this disruptive innovation can happen

The two ways that Disruptive Innovation can happen. The first is a Low-End Segment Strategy by offering a product or service at a very low cost and then move up market. The second is called a Non-Consumption Strategy which basically means true innovation where consumption didn’t exist prior to the product being available.

We have the presentation embedded here for your enjoyment. Please tell us what you found interesting? What worries you about this data? What excites you about this data?

Google Goggles is a new ‘visual search’ app for Android phones. Instead of using words, take a picture of an object with your camera phone: Google then attempt to recognize the object, and return relevant search results. Goggles also provides information about businesses near you by displaying their names directly in the camera preview.

As Google make clear, this is far from perfect yet, but it’s still getting us thinking about how we might use this kind of technology for clients.

Wonder when it will work with social networks? And wonder when it’s out on iPhone?

More detail on Goggles on Google’s site, here.

(Full disclosure: Google is a client of BBH)

Following our piece looking at journalism (a review of the transformational change at the Telegraph Media Group) and fiction (interview with Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher at Penguin), our interest in the profound changes occurring in the publishing industry continues with this look at the opportunities in mobile.

We often talk about the future of mobile media and what it will all look like, but what about the future of the mobile media of the past? The notion of carrying around your reading as reams of inked paper might disappear, but the written word certainly won’t. So it seems a very natural progression for print publishers to move from paper to digital by simply reformatting for small screen mobile devices. But the considerations are vast. And more importantly, how much do people really want to use their phones as reading devices anyway?

We recently met a company called ScrollMotion, a New York-based iPhone app developer that is hard at work answering these questions. The company have been steadily creating a suite of new tools for traditional print media companies to better engage their readers via apps on mobile phones, and in the process, quietly making publishing deals with a wide range of top-notch publishers. Their growing client list is impressive and includes Conde Nast, Hearst, Time Inc., Tribune Company, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Simon & Schuster, Random House, and Wiley.

I must admit, I’ve been more skeptical than anyone about the longevity of a business built on a large-scale desire to read books and magazines on the mobile phone, but only five months in ScrollMotion has proven me wrong. The company is currently focused on the iPhone as it provides more avenues for interactive exploration than the top-selling Kindle or other readers on the market.  Their Iceberg Reader, which offers book publishers the ability to distribute content via the iPhone, has grown rapidly (and though they asked me not to repeat specific numbers, let’s just say they are very impressive).

Their reader software allows publishers to animate content in a way easiest described as a flipbook, allowing users much more personal interaction than video currently provides. And with the newly provided ability to accept third party advertising, Scroll Motion is now tooled to provide the means to design, distribute and monetize print content through mobile devices in ways that opens a number of new doors for old media.

I sat down with Josh Koppel, founder of ScrollMotion, and their design consultant, Josh Liberson (of Helicopter) in what I originally intended to be a discussion revolving around design, but which took a number of even more interesting turns …

BBH Labs: Tell us a bit about the specific needs Scroll Motion is filling within the market?

Koppel: The first need is that publishers are not quite technologists. If you look at why magazines on the web feel like not quite meaningful experiences, its because publishers do something great, they make words and pictures beautiful but haven’t in the past done a great job of making them live in a digital way. Digital books, the definition to me, has always been, “formatted high-resolution text.” And I feel that’s been a very limited definition. And (expanding the possibilities) is what we’ve been focused on.

I made one of the first PDF magazines in 1994 when I was in college, so I got a great taste for why that wasn’t a great solution for books and for magazines. Then I worked on creating the digital standard for music liner notes, and liner notes seemed like a way to play with that notion, it was the first time we needed a digital experience that was picture and lyrics and text that was formatted in a strange way, not in a routine way.

Liberson: Old media has been much maligned, its not old media, its old distribution channels. The question is how do you take this old media and make it new again and that’s what we’re helping people do. If you look at publishing as an industry, and I think this is why The New York Times stands out as an example, show me any other industry that doesn’t invest any money in R&D?

The moment were in right now is the makers of content are well behind the capabilities of the platforms. What we are setting out to do is help educate the makers of the world’s great high quality, high value editorial content into new modes of thinking. Magazines have been sitting on these incredible archives of content without any opportunity to do anything with them other than create a book, so whole new opportunities emerge.

Koppel: This stuff is our culture and if we are getting to a world where print is in a transitional moment, we have to actively build the platforms for this stuff to live. My feeling is that if we let the grownups do it we’ll end up in a world without cover art, end up in a world that is compromised cause it’s all about making the platform, not filling it. This isn’t about just converting paper to pixels; we want to make stuff that actually lives up to the content.

We’re trying to build the next set of tools for interaction with mobile content for kids books, for graphic novels, all these things we’re used to engaging with now but were trying to bring them to a small screen in a way that keeps the integrity of the content. It’s not a step down.

Liberson: Magazines are the original but unrealized social network: audiences aligned around a sincere common interest. That kind of ability to unlock those relationships, create pathways to all the people that are engaging the same media and have common interests is very interesting and in a way those networks are going to become more valuable. What is the future of advertising in this space probably has a lot to do with harnessing this organic power that exists around tastes, a preference.

BBH Labs: We somewhat understand what the problems are, but I’m trying to get a better sense of the solutions, as you guys seems to be farther along in realizing them.

Koppel: It’s the genius of the app store. Everyone gave content away for free in the beginning of the internet because you had to. If you had to pay for content on top of the fact that you were (paying to) connect it never would have happened, but that mindset overtook the industry to a place that you have newspapers going out of business and magazines struggling. So the point is that Apple saw that need too, saw an opportunity to finally create micro-transactions.

BBH Labs: How’s business going?

Koppel: Great. Were selling lots and lots of books. The fact we’ve done all these deals with these publishers, and the amount of content that’s coming to this space really means that people will be engaging in this new dialogue, they will be engaging in these tools, the next generation of creative people will get to play in this space. There is an opportunity to engage content wherever you are and whenever you want.

BBH Labs: But how will the overall experience change? I mean, young people’s language and communication habits are changing greatly. Emoticons, Twitter? Do people even want to read?

Liberson: Right now were in chapter one. Everything is being outputted as a list. It’s the simplest visual metaphor we can imagine for how data goes from print into this (mobile device). It follows the same methodology we have on the desktop. That is going to very quickly morph into a, not a game, but a more gaming sensibility in terms of play: cause and effect. There’s no cause and effect in a printed piece.

Koppel: I think people are reading a lot, they are just reading different things. People talk about reading for 10 minutes or 5 minutes ‘cause it allows me to have a private intellectual life on my own time that I’m reclaiming to myself. I really think were talking the ability to provide people with content in an interstitial way, in a way that they don’t have to carry anything else with them, that is pretty revolutionary.
That’s the killer app of this app: it lives with you.