sylleptic - mark hopwood’s blog

Back this weekend from a fantastic holiday, all researched and arranged using the Internet. It’s fantastic to think about how much travel has been changed by sites like TripAdvisor, and the sites produced by even small hotels are getting so good. There were only 2 bad experiences throughout the whole trip, both down to the same company, who used to be a client of mine. Can you guess who:

• Is desperate to get their customers to check in online?
• Changes booked seats (checked in online) at the departure gate, so that people who didn’t bother to check in online can be kept seated together?
• Markets exhaustively and expensively to independent travellers, to maximise their yield by cutting out agents and tour operators?
• Oversells a 747-300 by 22 seats, and has the same situation on every flight on that route for the next 3 months?
• Lies about a smaller plane having been sent (and by the way, what plane do most airlines have that is bigger than a 747-300?) so there aren’t enough seats?
• Prioritises the customers of agents and tour operators over independent travellers (who bought their tickets the day the seats came online) when deciding who gets bumped, because it can’t afford to upset their big stakeholders?

I bet anyone who’s travelled with this airline in the last 12 months can name them. The point is that online services and advertising need to be backed up and executed on in the actual business: doing it in the advertising isn’t enough.

I’m not angry, but I am flying Virgin next time!

Facebook is doing something very interesting in allowing advertisers to buy specific networks. This ad was (I presume) created for members of the Agency.com network. It’s extremely targetted: it mentions Agency.com by name, and it’s advertising a service people at our company could very well be interested in.

This kind of thing is valuable, makes minimal use of personal data and would seem like an example where they’ve been very smart.

Shame about the creative though…

Google have started selling print ads in the US, which is an interesting venture in its own right, but the most interesting thing in this example is the extent to which they’re using the ads to drive potential customers online.

Aside from the URLs in the ad, we’re also encouraged to search Google for specific search terms (doubtless incredibly well optimised for this advertiser). There’s also a QR code, or 2-d bar code, which is a machine readable image that contains a link or other information. The software to read these isn’t widely available yet, but the more organisations like Google support them, the more people will install the software. Next year, a large number of phones will probably have the QR code reader installed at the factory, so we can expect use of QR codes to become a lot more common.
Thanks to Blognation for the story.

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Tags: google, qr codes

http://adverlab.blogspot.com/2007/11/ad-zappers-for-facebook.html lists a variety of plug-ins for Firefox that will remove contextual ads from your Facebook experience.

It might get a bit tricky charging for ads that are being removed at the browser. Whether they’re counted as valid ad impressions before they’re removed isn’t made clear in the article.

We’ve been keen to do something with QR codes for some time, and have run up against practical obstacles to their effectiveness each time, so it’s good to see an example that does make sense. Thanks to Blognation for the details.

QR codes are 2 dimensional bar codes. They look a bit like this normally.

This one directs you to my blog, since it contains the URL “blog.markhopwood.com”.

The idea is that you download a piece of software to your phone, then when you see one of these funny squares, you take a photo of it with your phone, and you’re directed to a website with related content. In the newspaper example, people reading an article about Radiohead might see one that links to a mobile site with one of their videos on it.

Why is this idea better than others I’ve seen (like this one that Iain Tait pointed out). The basic problem is that the software isn’t pre-installed on all our mobile phones yet, like it is in Japan. So the experience when you see one of these posters is pretty shallow. No software, no link. Maybe you think it looks cool, but that’s about it.

But if your favourite newspaper or magazine starts using them, you’ll have lots of reasons to download the software in each edition. And because it’s something printed, in your hand, rather than something on a poster or the side of a bus, you’ll still have all those QR codes when you’ve downloaded the software. And they can print instructions (like the ones below) on what to do when you see one of the codes. In short, there’s a bigger incentive to get the software, instructions and help with getting it, and it’s clear that it’s an ongoing thing. So it’s more likely to get used.

The best thing is that once you’ve loaded the software for your newspaper, you’ll have it the next time you see a poster in the street, so it’s driving technology adoption across the board.

The Information Commissioner has ruled that bluetooth marketing isn’t subject to the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003 and that marketers no longer need to get an opt-in before they send messages over bluetooth.

His ruling is here and the IPA guidance on the implications are here.

Essentially this ruling removes the legal protection people have from unsolicited bluetooth marketing messages, but that doesn’t mean that good sense shouldn’t be applied. Unwelcome messages have a negative effect on the recipient from a marketing perspective, so responsible advertisers are unlikely to descend into bluetooth spamming as a result of this ruling.

The IPA also pointed out that messages need to be suitable for all ages, especially since a greater proportion of under 18s probably leave their bluetooth on than is the case in the rest of the population.

This article at the Economist makes some very strong points about Facebook as a business, and is well worth reading. Given that the whole value of the company is in its right to market to its users, the value of that marketing really has to be thought through. Lots of people are predicting Facebook will be the next behemoth Internet business, comparing it with Google, but is this a valid argument?

One of the first creative directors I worked with used to talk about “mission marketing”, creating advertising that online consumers were responsive to because it helped them with whatever task they were carrying out. If they’re searching on Google, adwords are a perfect example of this, and that’s why they’re so successful. But you can do it in other ways too: mortgage calculators on property sites, entertainment for our downtime, even cleverly placed 468×60 banners can help users complete their missions.

But what’s our mission when we’re on Facebook? We’re catching up with friends, gossip, making plans for the weekend. Sure, some advertising might help us with that, but an awful lot of brands have nothing to do with this particular mission, and could easily be seen as a nuisance or distraction.

It’s certainly possible to develop clever campaigns that help people research their holidays, or swap tips on the best DVD player, or whatever, and to incorporate those in Facebook, but how scaleable is that model compared to sponsored search listings? How many Facebook apps will one person install and use? It seems pretty clear (and this is one of the Economist’s points) that the comparison with Google is specious.

Which takes me back to the valuation question: is Facebook really worth $15bn? When people value companies, they do it on the basis of long term expected return on investments. If I invest $100 in one company, instead of another, or a savings account, I expect my money back eventually, and I expect an income that is greater than I’d get elsewhere, especially if there’s some risk attached. A company’s value (number of shares in issue times price per share) is often worked out as a ratio to annual earnings or profit. British Airways, with earnings of $500m, is worth about $5bn, so the price/earnings ratio is about 10 (11.18 when I looked, but I’m simplifying!)

What do those numbers look like for Facebook? $100m in earnings this year, and a $15bn valuation based on the Microsoft deal, means it would take them 150 years to earn back their market cap. Obviously they’re expected to grow, but how much growth is possible? And will they be around for long enough to repay all this enthusiasm?

News International is (according to this article) about to launch a vertical search engine focussed on the UK property market. To some, this might seem like a fairly uninteresting development in online property advertising. There are lots of property websites in the UK, Rightmove being the most prominent. Zoomf (who I’m involved with as a non-exec director), Propertyfinder and a host of other companies are also in this very competitive niche, so you might ask who needs another property website?

Read more »

I’ve known the people at Emailvision for 6 years, and have worked with them on several occasions, as a client and as a consultant. The company has grown amazingly, especially over the last couple of years. This morning I was at the Institute of Directors for their breakfast seminar about version 6 of the Campaign Commander email marketing platform.

As they explained it, version 6 is about 3 things: easy integration with other web-based applications, better reporting and control over user rights and workflow.

Integration is all about APIs (the interfaces developers use to integrate applications with each other) and web services , a specific kind of API used for web applications. As they explained it, you no longer need to use the Emailvision front-end at all if you don’t want to: you can control and access anything Emailvision can do just by using their APIs. It’s unlikely that anyone is going to write their own user interface to Emailvision’s email platform: there’s a good one already. It does mean that most integrations you might like to do will be possible.

Suppose, for example, you’ve got an e-commerce website that’s been doing its own email marketing, but you’ve grown out of the built-in capabilities. Now you can choose between enhancing your own email platform or building an interface and using Emailvision’s. Given the amount of R&D they do each year, the idea of moving up to their platform could be a lot more attractive than attempting to enhance your solution. If you’re using Salesforce.com or Highrise for your customer relationship management, or Coremetrics for your analytics, you could easily benefit from this integration.

There’s something about this that reminds me of yesterday’s piece about Dopplr: building something very functional and making it easy to plug into (and well-documented) makes it much more likely that people will pick up your application and start doing interesting things with it.

Chris Combemale, Emailvision’s COO, and I were talking about APIs for the Emailvision platform in 2002, so it’s great to see them doing such a comprehensive job now, and placing it at the centre of their product strategy. And very web 2.0!

The reporting enhancements looked very nice, and I would expect so too! This is a very competitive area and keeping the reporting ahead of its rivals is a necessity.

Finally, on workflow and user rights, they’ve implemented controls and structures that remind me very much of those you see today in commercial content management systems. User access can be defined at the role level, and then users can be assigned to different lists (effectively databases) with very specific control over access rights. Different workflows for campaign development and execution can be set up, and these can again vary from list to list. It’s very powerful, allowing customers to set things up so that the CEO can run a dashboard report but can’t inadvertently push the campaign live. Agencies can be allowed to upload creative (and perhaps to test it) but not to create campaigns, if that’s how you want it.

My only reservation on this point is to ask whether they might open up the workflow and user architecture, so that big enterprises can use their existing LDAP or Active Directory for user access, for example. Might a corporate website built on Sharepoint 2007 link to Emailvision for its email campaign management, and use Windows Workflow Foundation to integrate web and email development workflows?

Finally, it’s interesting to see how many pre-configured packages of services Emailvision are offering. Having acquired Barnes & Richardson, the Brussels-based viral experts, last year, they’ve designed a full-service viral solution that looks very competitive. They also have post-sale engagement and up-sell solutions that would benefit a lot of retailers.

After a great deal of effort from a cast of hundreds (well, almost) we’ve launched British Airways’ preview site for Heathrow Terminal 5, which opens next year. It’s a feast of interactive content, showing all aspects of what’s going to be an amazing place to travel through. Some of the team have had visits already, and it sounds incredibly futuristic. They say on the site that bags will often be waiting on the carousel for arriving passengers, and it’ll be the way they’ve designed and used technology to improve service that will determine how successful it turns out to be.

Well done to the team that built the site: I know it’s been hard work, though maybe not as hard as erecting the largest free-standing building in the UK…