Defying its numerous obituaries, broadcast television set a new world’s record last night as Super Bowl 44 attracted more viewers than any TV show in history – 106.5 million according to Nielsen – beating the previous record of just under 106 million for the series finale of M*A*S*H which aired on Feb. 28, 1983. This triumph also clearly showed how new media needn’t displace old media, as millions of viewers tweeted their way through the game, commenting on everything from plays to commercials in a virtual party that spanned the nation. Web sites may have superior reach, but there’s nothing on the planet that can focus the simultaneous attention of so many rapt consumers on a screen and deliver it to advertisers.
The 2010 BrandBowl, a Twitter-based ad competition produced by the Mullen Ad Agency and Radian6, a social media measurement company, declared Doritos and Google the winning advertisers, and I was not alone in feeling gratified that Google chose to open its coffers to CBS on this occasion, and produced an ad that not only effectively romanced its search product, but also (as David Card pointed out in a tweet) gave new hope to copywriters all over the world.
Last year I wrote about how advertisers like E*Trade had fumbled keywords like shankapotamus, turning over their traffic to folks like me. This year E*Trade got the message and bought milkaholic, and a number of other advertisers followed suit.
But the spot I want to talk about didn’t even make the #brandbowl top 10, despite featuring Beyonce, the Twitter Bird, and a host of other online icons. Unless I miss my mark, most of America had no idea what to make of it. Here it is:
It’s tempting to enumerate the many reasons why this ad is a failure from a creative standpoint – basically, it’s a cacophony of clashing and contradictory metaphors and idioms with no clear brand promise or value proposition – but it’s nonetheless noteworthy in its attempt to go mainstream with the message of Internet on your TV. And therein lies a tale of interest.
We are reminded that, a year ago, Yahoo! made headlines announcing its platform for TV widgets, called Yahoo! Connected TV, at CES2009, to be supported by four major TV manufacturers (Samsung, Sony, LG, and Visio). Yesterday, Yahoo was featured on the Vizio widget bar, but like all of the other manufacturers, Vizio has chosen to brand its own widget platform – VIZIO Internet Apps (VIA) – and give Yahoo tenant status. This is rapidly leading to a condition where each manufacturer has its own proprietary widget platform, which, needless to say, is a path to doom for the whole idea.
Meanwhile, Canoe Ventures (remember them?) and CableLabs announced the completion of a new (yet-to-be-fully-revealed) standard called EBIF IO6 (“IO6” for short) which extends the original EBIF specification to cover widget-like applications that are delivered outside the context of an individual show or channel (“unbound” in industry parlance). That puts the standard on an apparent collision course with the manufacturer’s Internet-connected TV aspirations, and is sure to make for an interesting race to critical mass.
This appears to be a good-news, bad-news story. The bad news is that developers and content providers will not have a single platform to target with applications for some time. The good news, however, is that the race is (back) on, and that the service providers and manufacturers have little choice but to accelerate their efforts if they’re to have any chance at achieving critical mass in the marketplace before their opponents. Nothing like competition to bring out the in us.
The big question, of course, remains: what are these magical TV widgets that are going to engage consumer interest in new sets and services? After all, tweeting on a smartphone during the game didn’t seem so bad. Oops, there’s the whistle, seems like we’re out of time….
Big industry changes are often best captured in the smallest exchanges. Case in point: during a Congressional hearing to investigate the proposed acquisition of NBCU by Comcast, Jeff Zucker, the embattled CEO of NBCU, was asked by Representative Rick Boucher about the company’s prevention of Boxee users from accessing Hulu content. (Boxee is a service that can display Internet content on TV, and Hulu is a service, part-owned by NBCU, that distributes TV programs over the Internet. Those unfamiliar with this dispute can read about it here.)
Zucker’s response:
“This was a decision made by the Hulu management to, uh, what Boxee was doing was illegally taking the content that was on Hulu without any business deal. And, you know, all, all the, we have several distributors, actually many distributors of the Hulu content that we have legal distribution deals with so we don’t preclude distribution deals. What we preclude are those who illegally take that content.”
Boxee’s vocal CEO Avner Ronen responds in a blog post with a logic that is difficult to dispute: Boxee provides a web browser to access Hulu, and browsers as a rule do not need distribution deals to display content from the web, regardless of what device they display it on. In fact, this principle lies at the heart of the Internet, just as the principle that TV manufacturers don’t need licenses to display broadcast content lies at the heart of the TV business. The internet has simply extended this open interoperability principle one level from hardware to software. Ironically, for the TV business, this is actually a step backwards, to the pre-cable days when access to broadcast signals was open to anyone who could receive them. Even more ironic is that broadcasters, then as now, felt a strong need to defend themselves against the incursion of cable into their business models, while today companies like NBCU make more from their cable programming than free-to-air broadcasting.
Boxee and others have made the point that Internet distribution has the capacity to support the same types of monetization as cable and broadcast: advertising and subscription fees, and that conditional access is certainly feasible on the Internet. This argument is not lost on broadcasters, but it’s safe to assume they’ve done the math and concluded that they can’t afford a full embrace of Internet distribution to TV sets, at least until a good deal more technical and legal infrastructure is in place to protect these new models. Thus they’ve adopted the untenable position that “online” content can’t legally be displayed on TV, despite the obvious point that technology is making it easier than ever for consumers to do so.
Zucker’s testimony is a clear indication that these companies probably have less time than they think. Although the Comcast/NBCU merger is largely seen as a way to preserve the existing cable carriage model by aligning the interests of (traditional) content with (traditional) distribution, the process has also had the effect of shining a light on these issues. The more they are illuminated, the clearer it becomes that the status quo is profoundly unstable, and that the public is best served when its media institutions embrace new models mandated by the course of technology, rather than clinging to the past and declaring the future “illegal.”
(This post was co-authored by Allen Weiner and Mike McGuire)
Rumors being what they are, much of what Steve Jobs announced at the iPad launch event didn’t come as a surprise to the overload crowd at the Yerba Buena Center insane Francisco. The iPad is a “tweener” that fits nicely between an iPhone/iTouch and netbook computer. With a 9.7-inch screen weighing in at 1.5 pounds, sporting battery life claims of 10 hours, the iPad could be ideal as a prototypical interactive content consumption device…but a few unanswered questions challenge its viability for media companies.
For book publishers, some of whom were waiting for signs of wide-scale acceptance of the universal e-publishing standard, ePub, the iPad came through…sort of. Although the device supports ePub, Apple is believed to be planning to implement its own DRM (Fairplay) to secure the ePub files, which could presumably then be distributed only through iTunes (that is, iBooks). If that is the case, Apple’s book efforts puts it in the came category as Amazon which utilizes a proprietary DRM that ties Kindle books Amazon.com. Hence any e-book purchased from Barnes & Noble, Sony or any of the countless e-book retailers will not work on the iPad. In addition, e-books from libraries, which are powered by Overdrive who uses Adobe’s DRM, also would not work on the iPad.
For both newspapers and magazines, the iPad remains a mystery. The demo of The New York Times, which was created in a compressed timeframe, is not much indication of what potential newspapers have on the iPad. Those are questions that can only be answered by developers who are busily downloading the new SDK and attempting to devise compelling paid or ad-supported content applications. The initial focus is on paid applications (and again, there is no evidence that consumers will pay for digital newspaper content) as there was no mention of advertising support from Apple, which many were expecting following Apple’s recent acquisition of Quattro, a mobile ad network. The same goes for magazine publishers who now have the color device they have asked for but will need to experiment with varied content applications and business models, while scrambling to source enough video to do justice to consumer expectations raised in demos.
The iPad launch will create ripples throughout the publishing industry: supply chain providers who digitize and format content as well as develop applications will thrive; standalone e-reader device manufacturers will have to re-price their devices now knowing that the WiFi-only 16G iPad can function as a high-end e-reader. Plastic Logic’s Que, the Alex and Entourage Edge may be forced to revisit their announced retail prices.
For video content such as TV and movies, a similar catch was apparent. While the iPad can clearly render beautiful hi-def full screen video, its lack of support for Flash was evident in the tiny blue cubes that appeared on web pages during the demos. This means that TV-friendly web distribution platforms like Hulu are unlikely to work on the iPad. (A Hulu app for the iPhone/Touch has been rumored for some time but has yet to materialize.) Here, too, Apple appears to have reserved the distribution of TV and movies for its device for iTunes, although YouTube remains a wildcard if it should release a sound model for content owners to monetize through rentals or sell-through. Also unexplored was the possible connection between the iPad and Apple TV, which have clearly enticing possibilities.
Then there’s the mysterious absence of any mention or demonstration of the device’s advertising potential, or Apple’s apparent newfound interest in participating in the business. With iTunes emerging as the sole channel for monetizing content of any kind on the iPad, advertising remains a critical source of revenue to publishers and video providers alike, and one on which Apple’s chief emerging rival, Google, is laser-focused with innovations like Google Goggles and QR barcodes readable by Android devices, and distributed to 100,000 businesses. Of course, these ideas require a camera, which the iPad lacks.
Still, Apple did not fail to push the envelope and generate enthusiasm for its latest creation. Now, with Apple setting the standard for content consumption devices, other manufacturers—most notably PC OEMs, will begin to launch their tablets and will look to Android and possibly Windows as device platform. In particular, Android will thrive with Google deploying its Google Editions and YouTube strategies to offer cloud-based delivery of all content to the universe of Android devices, with a well-proven advertising component.
And let’s not leave communications service providers out of the mix. Whether Apple’s choice of AT&T is one consumers find popular, it leaves Verizon and Sprint as ready partners for HP, Dell, and others whose tablets are in queue.
All that said, content companies of all kinds need to examine the iPad and the new version of the iPhone OS with a few things in mind. First, Steve Jobs is without peer in his ability to provide a vision of the future through the medium of the product he happens to be introducing at the time. In the case of the iPad, he described the magic of having the “…Internet in your hand.” True that, but for a lot of us, that came with the iPhone, the Touch and the AppStore. And as revolutionary as those products have proven themselves to be, the real magic has come from the integration of all those elements into a set of compelling content experiences. Second, the iPad extends by one the form factors those kinds of experiences can be delivered through. Third, and this is really important, we’re still talking about the “Internet” as defined by Apple. The potential for game-changing killer apps to come for the iPad is not in question. And the potential power of content experiences Apple can enable is not in question. But the handle on that potential is being controlled by one entity.
In that regard, we remain puzzled at the continued estrangement between the iPhone OS-based product line – iPhone, Touch and now iPad – and Adobe, especially Flash. Do the power-management issues cited by Apple as reasons for the iPhone’s persistent lack of Flash support? We think lack of Flash support still causes many, many media and content companies, and their developers, a great deal of strategic angst.
The iPad is not the iPod for publishing. Music was a ready and waiting asset that needed little “post-production” work to be suited for a portable device, and, when the iPod arrived, the industry had already been badly disrupted. Hence the iTunes store was quickly filled with both quantity and quality. But other forms of content are not so enthusiastic to commit to a closed channel platform that controls both device and distribution, and the next 60 days will be crucial as Apple hopes to load its electronic storefront with a selection of content that will encourage consumers beyond the “fanboy” crowd to be iPad lovers.
CES2010 was packed with innovation – from 3D TVs to myriad e-readers and mobile computing devices of every shape and size. No one stole the show, but almost every vendor I saw put something impressive on the table.
In the end I couldn’t fully escape the wistful sentiment, “if only the world economy would start growing fast enough to allow consumers to buy all this cool stuff.” But this is a short-sighted view. The longer-term vision is that the consumer electronics industry appears on the brink of converging with – and rescuing – its two beleaguered sister industries, telecommunications and media.
First, the convergence of CE and telecom is evident in almost every device, which now not only contains a digital radio chipset but also comes bundled with some kind of telecom service and/or platform. This creates vast new opportunities for telecom companies to partner with manufacturers to become content distributors, with many potential new revenue models, from service provisioning to ecommerce. This is one of the cornerstones of the emerging electronic publishing model.
Second, CE appears ready to lead media – especially publishers and video producers – into a new market landscape where they might recover their status as privileged providers of valued content to consumers, a status that the internet for all its ubiquity has significantly eroded. Inspired by the vision and success of Apple (which predictably managed to play a starring role at CES despite being absent), CE companies now all recognize the need to bundle content platforms and services with devices. And media companies, also learning from Apple (and Amazon), for their part recognize the critical need to create and enforce standards on those platforms to assure interoperability and openness and avoid lock-in, concepts that the IT world has recognized for some time. While “interoperability” defies the Apple approach to differentiation and control, most manufacturers are learning the subtleties of how to differentiate while adhering to content standards that maximize consumer value in the new landscape of digital media.
So the stage is set for a new golden age, supported by a potential virtuous cycle roughly like this:
Innovations like 3D video content, internet-connected TVs and components, electronic paper, and new portable device form-factors will drive consumer demand for new devices (economy permitting);
As devices come bundled with data comm. services (both open internet-based, as in most connected TVs and Blu-ray players, and closed mobile-based, as in most e-readers and netbooks), demand for telecom will rise and new service bundling models will replace or supplement current obsolescence cycles of CE;
These innovations will also increasingly be supported by open standards like the MVC standard for 3D video and the EPUB and PDF standards for electronic publishing, creating new more-secure global content distribution platforms with better monetization capabilities;
As content becomes more monetizable on these platforms, high-value content will shift to these channels, creating new creative possibilities and more demand for premium content experiences that require the latest upgrades, etc.
Of course, such a utopian outcome is far from assured. Any number of macroeconomic factors, regulatory factors, and competitive instincts that favor extreme disruption, could easily derail this fragile new “experience economy.” But this is perhaps the first CES I can remember that demonstrated how the long-oversold concept of “convergence” might actually work.
Let’s take a moment to appreciate the prescience of futurist Alvin Toffler, who coined the phrase “information overload” in the late 1960s. While some predictions, like human cloning and genetic architecture, are still way out there, IO is arguably the defining quality of our current culture.
The most recent exhibit comes from Google, which just announced real-time search, that promises to “bring your search results to life with a dynamic stream of real-time content from across the web.”
“Now, immediately after conducting a search, you can see live updates from people on popular sites like Twitter and FriendFeed, as well as headlines from news and blog posts published just seconds before. When they are relevant, we’ll rank these latest results to show the freshest information right on the search results page.”
Microsoft’s Bing already integrates real-time Twitter and Facebook results, although, unlike Google, has yet to integrate them directly into the main search results pages. And, in a clue to the economics behind all of this, Yahoo! has also introduced Ad Interest Manager, a tool that allows Yahoo! users to “assert even greater control over their online experience” by selecting categories of interest to be used in targeting ads.
Tempting as it is, I’ll refrain from launching into a diatribe about the deleterious social effects of our growing addiction to (the illusion of) “instant knowledge” delivered in a stream of constant interruptions – if you’re in the mood for this sort of thing, I enjoyed Simon Dumenco’s nice little summary on AdAge. Instead, I’ll just try to make a point about the economic trends that underpin this immediacy arms race and the implications for technology and marketing.
The point is this: search as we’ve known it has been pretty much a context-free, anonymous experience and, while this has created some relevancy issues, these were tolerable in exchange for the convenience and security that anonymity provides. As we get hooked on the firehose of real-time and take it mobile, this trade-off starts to fail, and relevancy filtering becomes a necessity. So search will increasingly need to be personalized. This in turn will increase its efficacy to advertisers, widening the gap between search engines and untargeted media.
This escalation doesn’t just apply to consumers. Advertisers and publishers, who also need to chase relevancy, will increasingly be dependent real-time data to recognize patterns and trends that they need to address. The challenge will be to build systems and organizations that are capable of processing the accelerated pace of information with the stability of a long-term brand.
The contrarian view on real-time is that it will lead, in time, to a widespread craving for a return to some form of permanence and pacing in our relationships. In marketing, this translates into a resurgence of thoughtful branding over targeted promotion. On the other hand, it’s always important not confuse a clear view with a short distance, so for now, it’s time to tune in, open the information flood-gates, and get your tweets to those in-market consumers.
Blogging is sometimes a great way to get interesting dialogs going, and yesterday’s post, Will Microsoft Exit the Ad Server Business?, drew a notable response from Harrison Magun, Director, Advertiser Tools and Technologies Specialist Sales at Microsoft. Harrison takes me to task for failing to make a crucial distinction between ad servers for publishers and ad servers for advertisers. In his words:
Publisher Ad Serving and Advertiser Ad Serving are different products.
Harrison then goes on to say that advertiser ad serving is core to Microsoft’s advertising platform, and points to the Atlas Technology Partner Alliance, a factor that was also communicated to me by others at Microsoft. (He doesn’t comment on the publisher side.)
While it’s undeniably true that these are different products, they share core functionality in common, and, perhaps more important, have both been historically marketed side-by-side under the same umbrella brands (Atlas and DART) for some time. In the blog medium one is often challenged to compress things to the point where certain distinctions are omitted, but perhaps in this case the distinction is important, because it’s plausible that Microsoft could exit the publisher (or “sell-“) side of the server business, yet still reinforce its commitment to the buy-side.
While such a strategy would not completely eliminate conflicts (advertisers and agencies still need assurances that their tools will give them neutral access to all available sources of inventory), the conflicts are less prominent than on the sell side where many online publishers consider MSN a direct competitor.
Moreover, as Harrison also points out, Microsoft has invested in “engagement mapping,” a strategy to shift the attribution of conversions from the “last click” (which is usually from a search results page) to ad exposures within a certain time period (more often display ads). This is widely seen as an attempt to reclaim some of the credit that Google, as the dominant player in search, has by convention been awarded by advertisers and move it into the display channel where Microsoft has more to gain. This strategy does require Microsoft to keep its hand in buy-side tools.
Microsoft also has a strong record of working with agencies on tools, where there is arguably more upside than on the publishing side. For example, Microsoft has worked extensively with Mediabrands, Interpublic’s media agency holding company, on what they’ve dubbed “the first holistic advertising platform, the Media Operations Management System (M.O.M.S)” (announced here). So, while Google/DoubleClick appears to currently have a wider lead on the buy-side than the sell-side, it’s very possible that Microsoft could continue to press on this front even if they reconsider their sell-side positioning.
So, mea culpa for omitting this distinction in my post. However, an even more critical distinction that I believe is too frequently glossed-over by the marketers of these products is the distinction between an ad server and an ad network. I’ve heard analyst claims that this distinction is fading, that the ad server will eventually be replaced by the network. This is a dangerous idea. Both publishers and agencies will continue to need tools which allow them to book and manage their own directly negotiated transactions without intermediaries and with a minimum of pricing friction. And both sides are increasingly recognizing that when tools are bundled with inventory from the same vendor, their position is weakened.
When Microsoft acquired aQuantive in 2007 for roughly $6 billion – an 85% premium – ostensibly to counter Google’s then-recent purchase of DoubleClick, some wondered whether competitive instincts were clouding judgment. AQuantive consisted of the interactive agency Razorfish, which Microsoft recently sold to Publicis for about $530 million, DrivePM, a performance ad network that Microsoft has now folded into the Microsoft Media Network, and the Atlas Suite of ad server products, which competes with DoubleClick’s DART system and was the principle motivation for the purchase.
In 2008 Microsoft doubled down on ad management tools with its purchase of Rapt, the leading pricing and yield management solution for publishers, which it quickly integrated into the Atlas Publishing Suite. Now sources tell me that Microsoft is no longer taking new customers for Rapt, and its biggest customer, Yahoo!, recently informed analysts that it will be discontinuing its use of the product in favor of internally-developed solutions. Meanwhile, ad operations providers such as Operative, Solbright, and FatTail have closed ranks on pricing and yield management in their ad product suites.
A few weeks ago, Microsoft announced a partnership with open source ad server provider OpenX, an Atlas competitor. The announcement describes an arrangement where OpenX provides a “distribution channel for Microsoft monetization products” (read: ads) and, in return, gains “access to a new base of potential customers – via referrals from Microsoft – for its enterprise advertising technology and services.” Although Microsoft’s director of advertising business development Peter McDonald, commented obliquely that “the OpenX ad server technology might be more appropriate [than Atlas] for certain types of Web publishers,” the partnership nonetheless suggests a migration path for Atlas users should Microsoft decide to exit the ad server business.
Another clue lies in the way Microsoft has evolved its description of PubCenter. In April, Microsoft described PubCenter as “the convergence into a single platform of the many systems we’ve developed and acquired…[including] technologies and tools provided by the former Atlas and Rapt solutions, as well as a self-serve offering.” Today, the PubCenter (beta) site offers “select web site owners the chance to place advertising from the Microsoft network on their web sites.” No word of convergence.
I’ve frequently advised publishers, vendors, and advertisers to be wary of the conflicts created by companies that offer both media campaign management tools and media under the same roof, so Microsoft’s decision to favor its media business over its ad server business might be a wise one. Still, $6 billion was a lot to pay for DoubleClick’s chief rival. And Google, for its part, seems to be well on the way to making its largest acquisition pay dividends.
This has been a month full of interactive advertising conferences in NYC, from OMMA AdNets, through Ad:Tech, and The Media and Money Conference, to the IAB Ad Operations Summit, to name a few. So many themes have been covered it’s hard to know where to start, but there’s one that stands out. In the ongoing quest for answers to the question of why it’s taking so long for brand advertisers to open their media war-chests to the Internet, a leading contender has emerged: it’s just not a safe environment for brands. A recent rise in online advertising exploits provided an edgy backdrop to many event panels as they grappled with cautious optimism for a recovery.
The issue came to light in October when a plague of phony insertion orders compromised major publisher sites including The New York Times, Foxnews.com, The Huffington Post, and Gawker, culminating in Starcom MediaVest Group’s request for a Federal investigation (see MediaPost or AdAge coverage). Fraudulent practices range from malware distribution, which appears to be on the rise (see Click Forensics’ alarming report, declaring that click fraud perpetrated by botnets, a result of malware distribution, has risen sharply) to the grey-hat technique of the month, “invisible advertising.” (Is it fraud? You decide. But it certainly isn’t the kind of thing that’s going to ease any brand-conscious minds.)
On the defensive side, AdSafe Media has set itself up to provide rating and filtering services for advertisers, which could help solve the website half of the problem (MediaPost), while sell-side optimizers such as The Rubicon Project, PubMatic, and AdMeld have been promoting their abilities to help publishers filter the advertising side. (PubMatic, incidentally, held an Ad Revenue conference of its own on October 8th which I attended and found quite good; see recap here.)
The bottom line is, major brands are going to continue to be skittish until these incidents calm down, but the incumbent leaders on the publishing and media agency sides should smell an opportunity here. Their common adversary, comprised of certain ad networks that are widely seen as depressing prices and arbitraging profits out of the system, is arguably also contributing to a general climate of low security by removing personal contact and active scrutiny from the marketplace. But the fact that premium players have also recently been successfully targeted suggests that they need to do more to distinguish themselves as safe – and thus worthy of premium pricing and greater spending allocations.
Publishers and agencies have a chance to take the upper hand on this issue, but they’ll have to move quickly. They need solid solutions of their own before someone like Google takes the reigns.
As with the Google music rumors, or the latest round of Apple tablet speculation, there seems to be more smoke here than fire: Apple files lots of patent applications, and, despite some loose reporting, this is just an application, there’s no guarantee it will be granted, and given that the innovation appears to be the use of advertising to subsidize an OS (which, at the end of the day, is just software), one might expect examiners to scrutinize it carefully, and look closely at some of the prior art in Zune, among others.
What’s interesting about this is the indication that Apple is thinking hard about advertising revenue, which is something we’ve been discussing on the media team for some time. On the one hand, as the rise of Android puts Apple and Google in more competitive situations, the power of Google’s ad-based revenue engine to subsidize innovation can’t be lost on Apple. On the other hand, there’s nothing Apple seems to hold more sacrosanct than its branded user experience, and suggesting that this could be sold to advertisers will clearly strike some as sacrilege. Apple may imagine it can leverage its success corralling app developers through an approval process with advertisers as well, but the difference is, for advertising to work economically, it needs to operate at much higher reach and frequency than app development.
Bottom line: Apple’s likely to experiment with ads, and there are many ways for them to do so – especially if they open up a publishing channel in iTunes to deliver print content to an Apple eReader… but an ad-supported OS carrying the Apple brand? With ads appearing at predefined times, blocking activities? Running a preroll after that iconic startup chime? Hard to imagine.
Still, if the patent issues, perhaps there’s some upside in licensing the IP to Android….
I want to thank all of the social media monitoring and analytics vendors who responded to last week’s challenge.
First, the highlights.
This year’s challenge listed 61 company names, of which 15 responded, a nearly 25% response rate. An additional 4 who were not mentioned also responded. Last year, 34 company names were listed, of which 23 responded, a 68% response rate. An additional 13 who were not mentioned responded last year. Of 36 who responded last year, 17 didn’t respond this year, even though they were all on the list.
Whatever the reason, some of the companies that didn’t respond remain on my list of top-tier players based on the work they’re doing for clients, which of course is the ultimate test.
Second, an observation. Even among those who responded quickly, I was surprised at how many neglected to take the step of mentioning their company’s name in the response. I’d suggest it’s wise to always keep SEO in mind and make it second nature when posting anything on behalf of your company’s brand. Search engines still matter, shankapotamus.
Contextual Bonus Awards (given to companies who were not on the list but responded anyway):
ImpactWatch (also noted for taking the opportunity to plug that they also monitor offline media)
Responsiveness Awards (please note that some of these companies have taken pains to point out that they are not “watchdogs” or monitors in any limiting sense, but focus more broadly on strategic inferences from broad range of consumer conversations. However, their mention here at least attests to the fact that they are listening.)
Thanks again to all who participated and please don’t hesitate to let flow the feedback.
Final note: as MotiveQuest’s Tom O’Brien noted, Microsoft Advertising was in the news last week at Advertising Week in NYC with a social media monitoring product called LookingGlass (AdAge, ClickZ), which we’ll be evaluating in more detail shortly (though not necessarily on the blog).
Such a move clearly suggests there’s still play in the social media monitoring space, even as the table stakes go higher. Microsoft’s entry may tend to commoditize the brand monitoring function and shift value focus to either broader forms of analysis, characterized by more strategic service-oriented approaches. Will the incumbent agency space dominate these services, or can new approaches scale better working outside the agency legacy? Stay tuned…
