I guess I’m not alone – it seems the good folks over at Cupertino have been on the same thought. And, as regulars on this blog will know, I’ve been a consumer of ebooks on my iphone for a long time.

There’s been a lot of discussion in the media about how the iPad may help publishers embrace the digital era – especially this excellent post over at Gizmodo, which identifies that Apple are trying to do what they did with the iPod: not haggle about the early adopter audience who’ve already bought a Creative JukeBox (or Kindle in this case) but rather reach the rest of the world. Those regular consumers who just like great kit that works.

The impact on marketing is huge. The transition of apps from the iPhone to the iPad will be an enormous opportunity for marketers who’ve succeeded in engaging their customers to the extent of committing to a download. This might be content driven – or commerce driven – or other ‘marketing as a service’ approaches. And yes, I’m look at you, fashion retailers, banks and other service providers.

My colleagues at my new employer, Lyris, are working on an app for a fashion retailer that already looks great on the iPhone. If the high net worth customers of this brand do, as I suspect they will, end up with iPads to do their surfing, they are almost certain to use it to do their online fashion shopping.

Are you ready for that?

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The sticking point for them was what was termed the ‘anticipation of disappointment’. The scenario is this:

• you are on the train home and decide to reserve a film to view – it’s 2002, so the DVD I want to rent is Minority Report.
• my local Blockbuster has a dozen copies of this film to rent out
• there is no way to link (in real time) in-stock DVD rentals with the web (or mobile for that matter

So I’ve decided that I want that film, but I know from experience that I cannot guarantee to get it. As my train journey progresses, I’m anticipating disappointment – and planning for what I will do if all the copies are out.

Now Blockbuster put a lot of time, thought and resource into countering that problem, but is is a significant issue for the business – and they needed a strategy to encourage people to deal with it without losing future custom.

There are whole categories of business that do this really well.  Luxury brands are high on that list: Chanel have released a Jade nail varnish that has been the buzz colour of the year:

“Having sold out in 40 minutes (for £16 a pop), Jade is now a collector’s item. Bottles on eBay (possibly placed there by impoverished beauty editors since hardly anyone else managed to get hold of it) are fetching £84.”

Similarly, Swiss watchmaker extraordinaire, Jean-Claude Biver, who runs Hublot strongly believes in creating scarcity. In boom times he under-delivered against orders for his highly prized – and priced – watches.

“You only desire what you cannot get,” he says. “People want exclusivity, so you must always keep the customer hungry and frustrated.”

Hublot has significantly outperformed the Swiss luxury watch market even in the past year – a period that has seen brutal declines of sales figures for his competitors.

Tchibo is one of Germany’s leading retailers. It’s an extraordinary business to British eyes: they completely revise their product range each week on totally different themes, stocking low-cost versions of popular products from luxury watches to laptops to kitchen appliances and clothing. Some of their sales items are enormous bargains, and consumers go out of their way to try and buy one… only to discover that they have sold out, Chanel-style, in the first 40 minutes.

This anticipation of disappointment is part of Tchibo’s brand proposition. It’s the trade-off against exceptional value. I’ve met many Germans who LOVE Tchibo.

I’m sure I don’t need to elaborate on the high-profile exploitation of scarcity in supply for items Sony Playstations or Xboxes. Variations on the same themes.

But there is a common thread through all of these: the disappointment is part of the brand promise. It underpins part of what makes the brand proposition work. And it is reinforced by a degree of exclusivity: other people make green nail polish, but it’s not Chanel Jade. Other games consoles are available, but it’s the PS3 I really wanted. The difficulty of buying a new Ferrari is part of the mystique around owning one.

Most retailers or suppliers have a different problem. In the Blockbuster case, their answer was to carefully balance supply and demand so that during the first couple of weeks of release, there were sufficient copies of a title on hand to meet the initial surge of interest. They then sold off second-hand copies that were surplus to later requirements… aided by the delay between rental release and full retail release.

Other retailers are less able to deal wtih the problem: my local cornershop in London routinely runs out of the weekend newspaper I want to buy before 10am. The result? I no longer trouble to go there at the weekend because I’m anticipating disappointment. But there is no trade off, just pure frustration.

Too many other organisations fall into this trap. And it breaks the brand promise.

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But while reading the article, I was amused by the piece top left on their blog page – the counter of ads optimised.

For some reason I decided to refresh… and saw the count revert back to the same start point I’d seen earlier.

Seems that Rubicon Project have discovered time travel

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Click to play the 1997 Guinness advert

I was leafing through the soon-to-be-lamented November issue of Revolution (specifically the Insider Guide to Digital Marketing) when I came across the following quote:

“The DMA estimates that marketers gain $45.06 (£28.28) in ROI for every dollar they spend on email campaigns.”
Mike Hilts, president & general manager, Yesmail

Now, speaking pedantically, this is factually correct. But so wrong.

This (frequently quoted) statistic is a ratio, that was converted into US dollar terms to help present the finding in meaningful terms to an American audience. So far so good. But why the half-conversion? If it’s $45.06 to $1, then it’s £45.06 to £1, right?

To be fair to Mike, he’s by no means the first to make this error – but surely as an industry it’s in our interest to get the facts right?

Unless, of course, Mike is saying that we’re only getting a little better than 60% of the return in the UK that our trans-Atlantic counterparts achieve? I thought not.

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I’ve long thought of  First Capital Connect’s ‘thamselink’ service as the train line that time forgot. So I was quite surprised earlier this year when they launched a potentially great Twitter service, promising that, if you tell them where you travel to and from, they will direct tweet service announcements that affect your journey.

The direct tweets generate and email and a text message to give me more-or-less instant notification of problems, so I can plan around them. This is a great customer service/marketing promise… I signed up.

I’ve since had all kinds of updates about stuff happening at opposite ends of their service, on trains that have no connection with my own little branch line. Oh well, you come to expect disappointment from train services I guess. Not the end of the world, just somewhat spammy.

This week, I’ve tried to use their trains on four separate occasions, only to discover that, for reasons that have gone unexplained (unexpected autumn leaf falls?), they have been unable to offer trains. Or, it seems, notifications on their twitter feed.

I’d never seek to discourage organisations from trying new things to improve their customer service or perception – and I strongly believe that the types of service messages First Capital Connect promised show enormous promise.

But if you make a promise, you have to keep it.

My frustration at the cancelled trains is severely compounded by the failure of the train company to keep their notification promise. I’d not have like the cancellation anyway, but would have been impressed with their ability to advise me ahead of time and therfore allow me to make other plans.

In the language of tweets, #fail

*===* UPDATE *===*

(no) more trains?

(12th November, noon) – I’ve found out why First Capital Connect are in such a bad way: they’re suffering from industrial action. They’ve even devised a new timetable. They just haven’t bothered to tell any of their twitter followers (to my knowledge) about this. Genius.

Oh – and it turns out compensation can be claimed at their website. Maybe that’s why they’re not telling anyone?

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yesterday's front page

… or so today’s lead piece in the Guardian’s G2 section would have it. Reminds me of the hand-wringing that surrounds the music industry in the wake of rapidly declining record sales.

The story is that Waterstone’s, having once been the darling of the book trade and the book-buying aficionado, has been forced by competition from supermarkets / competition from the internet / ebooks / ownership by HMV to become just like any other high volume retailer. They make offers on high volume sales items and narrow down their list of supported titles to a mere 20,000 items in a typical store.

I have enormous sympathy for the idea of selective punters missing out on the titles they’d love to lay their hands on… and I agree that the current pricing policies mean that you end up subsidising the Dan Brown’s of this world when you buy anything off the top 100 list.

But hold on a second: one of the interesting by-products of internet sales, ebooks and print-on-demand should be the ability to open up new markets and distribution channels for authors who do not appear on the ‘long tail’.

Incremental cost of production reduces close to zero… and then that just leaves the small question of trying to let people know the title is out there. That will then begin to call into question the role of publishers in the same way that record labels have been challenged in the music industry.

Of course, there are differences: despite the calamatous drop-off in sales of CDs, the music industry has grown in recent years. But the growth has come from other revenue streams, such as licensing, tours and merchandise.

That will be a tougher act to pull off in the book trade. Adoring crowds in the tens of thousands shelling out £50 to see Dan Brown read excerpts of The Lost Symbol? Maybe not.

I do, though, wonder whether in years to come, we’ll start to see stores on the high street where you can wander in, choose a title that fits that ‘long tail’ description, then browse more or sip a coffee in the cafe attached while waiting for it to be produced ‘on demand’ for you to walk out with after a brief delay. That, of course, complementing a thriving online industry of shipping virtual books to ereaders. And of course those big, fat discounted blockbusters and celeb biographies.

There are a lot of things that will need to happen for that day to arrive, but it suggests that, publishers aside, the future need not be so apocalyptic.

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A voice in the wilderness?

I met with the panellists I’m with at Local Social Summit next week, and we were discussing several issues that we want to cover next week.

High on the list was a subject I’ve talked about many times before: how you attribute value to social media marketing. Over the past year, as an industry, we’re getting better and better at figuring out some things to measure in the online world itself. This is good news… but it’s not always the most important thing.

How do we track what happens at the point of sale? How we measure that ‘last mile’  is going to be critical to understand the value of social marketing – where ’social meets local’ is a wonderful place to make that connection count.

Please come along and join us if you’d like to add to the debate – the panel details are below:

Social Media Marketing  – The Rules are Changing
With the rise of social media and powerful self-publishing tools (Blogger, WordPress, Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia etc) the conversation between brands and consumers has changed forever. In this session we will explore the new rules and what this means for advertising, marketing and PR. All of which have been changed in a flash and forever. We will also dig into what engagement, the conversation and the attention economy really means for marketers.
Moderator: Mike Weston
Panel:

• • Sokratis Papafloratos, CEO TrustedPlaces
  • Paul McCrudden, of the #6weeks project fame
  • Carolyn Watt, Profero
  • Nathan McDonald, Managing Partner – wearesocial

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As a CEO, how do you feel about the information being disseminated about your organisation by current or recently exiting employees? As Marketing Director, have you considered the description of your organisation in the Company Profile pages?

I’ve found these pages on LinkedIn to be enormously valuable in figuring out what is going on at a company I want to talk to – and understand. Take a glance at wunderloop’s profile on LinkedIn.

We’re in quite good shape here: the description of what the company does was written by one of the sales directors, so it gives a decent view. But it’s not the ‘authorised version’ per the company’s Director of Marketing.  For a start, the styling of the company as ‘wunderLOOP’ is something that really winds her up. (I’ve asked LinkedIn to change that, so it may not be visible when you visit the site).

Other companies – I won’t name and shame, but I’ve seen some great examples – are less well served by their declared profiles, which can be edited by pretty much any employee.

So far so ho-hum. But here’s the biter: my friend reflected his COO’s deep concern that the details about current employees – and more importantly recent departures and hires – had the potential to breach commercial / confidentiality interests. Are people updating their profiles giving away commercially sensitive information? Is it their data to share?

Of course, my argument is that you’re talking about public domain information being made more accessible, so no big deal, legally.

But to me this mirrors the shift of control we are seeing in marketing communications from controlled information from the organisation to crowd-sourced information. In other words, what matters is not what you, as the organisation, say about yourself so much as what others say about you.

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Broad's career takes off

Disclosure: I’m a bit schizophrenic when it comes to nationality – I’m a Kiwi by upbringing but have lived in the UK since I was 20. In other words, this weekend, in sporting terms, was golden for me: NZ’s All Blacks beat the Australian Wallabies 18-19 in the Rugby to secure the Bledisloe Cup and England clinched the final (cricket) test match of the Ashes series to win the trophy back at the Oval.

Throughout my time in the online business world, I’ve recognised that sport is a key ‘passion centre’ driving the way that people consume media online – be it on any of the ‘three screens’ we like to talk about.

But for me, one of the key elements of this summer’s Ashes series has been the way in which Twitter has played a significant role. If I had a pound for every time I’ve read Lily Allen’s comments about cricket…

Not just that, but there have been tweets galore from various cricketers – including Graeme Swann (who got into mildly hot water when clearly tweeting while driving), James Anderson and (most controversially) Phillip Hughes, whose one and only tweet revealed that he’d been dropped from the Australian side before the news had reached the England team in more conventional fashion.

Against a backdrop where a research company derided most tweets as ‘meaningless babble’, it seems to be meaningless babble that newspapers love quoting…

More to the point, to me, it signals again that we have moved further and further away from a world where what makes it into the public domain is controlled by how interesting the comments are to real people rather than to the editors of various forms of broadcast media. Or, put another way, the ‘democratisation of the means of distribution’ of content.

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I should declare an interest here – I’m VP International for wunderloop, who offer behavioural and other forms of targeting, wrapped in the Connect ad exchange… so I’m not exactly impartial.

However, a dozen or so years in online marketing have shown that success of placing campaigns is rarely single-dimensional. In fact I’d tend to draw it as a compass, with the main axes pointing to geographic, timing (e.g. day and day part), socio-demographic and behaviour/interest based. In the centre of the compass I’d put context – because that is always a factor, regardless of the other targeting elements.

How much of a factor depends (at least in part) on the aims of the campaign – for example: is it the influence of brand associations or is it purely direct response?

Again, this is not a binary question – there are definite shades of grey.

Either way, what the industry is seeing – and accelerated by the current economic conditions – is a shift in buying patterns from premium to discretionary advertising inventory. This is a trend that was happening in any case, but which a softer buying market is accelerating.

Targeting (BT or otherwise) offers benefits on both sides of the media buying/selling equation: buyers can get better placed campaigns to drive whatever measurable benefits the campaign is aimed at; sellers can get a better price for the inventory they select by making sure that they put the right inventory into the mix for their customers.

And what do the audience get?

Content, in one shape or form or another – and mostly free of charge.

When I started in the online business a dozen or so years ago, my dad would always ask “yes, but who PAYS for it?” In the late ’90s, that was a rare question to ask.

Most forms of payment, other than ad-funding, have been gradually debunked: subscriptions models have not really taken off; micro-payments exist but don’t provide the currency to compensate for the development of web systems or creating content; fees from ISPs have been stripped away, packaged or reduced to commodity pricing. So ad-funding is (for most online content) an inevitability – as well as very competitive.

Which means that attempts to add value to discretionary inventory are here to stay too.

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