Tag Archives: advertising

Coffee and TV

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January 16, 2012

Every year brings with it a new buzz, and this year is no different. Hot on the lips of everyone in the tech world at the moment, is the rise of the Smart TV. But what makes my TV so clever, we hear you ask? Look no further – What’s Hot is on hand to give you the lowdown.

The simple answer is the one thing that makes a TV ‘Smart’ is an internet connection. This connection can be built within the TV unit, as seen in recent new models, or from another piece of technology, such as a games console. This means the television is ‘connected’ (another word sometimes used instead of ‘Smart’) and therefore has the capability to bring a lot more engagement than the regular television experience.

So, why have industry experts decided 2012 is the year of Smart TV? Developments in technology mean that the majority of new TV models are now Smart. Buyers are ending up with Smart TVs without even asking for them, so it’s no longer just for the early adopters.

This week, the Consumer Electronics Show has acted as a catapult for Smart TVs, throwing them into the mainstream, with the big players showcasing their new products and technological developments. It’s an exciting time for the industry, observing how different manufacturers are using the technology and integrating it with other devices, encouraging the use of mobile and tablets with the TV unit. Soon, instead of a remote control, households will be using their smartphones to change channels.

This is a big step for brands into a connected TV world, and it is the start of a platform for engagement on the family screen. On top of that, there is the potential for monetary gain from subscription service opportunities. Examples of brands producing apps designed for connected TVs are already out there, such as Playboy UK.

The possibilities within the ever-increasing connected TV market are huge. The technological advancements, increasing broadband speeds, buoyant tablet market and variety of creative solutions are all providing a great platform for brands to engage with their consumers. At What’s Hot, we feel that those brave enough to fully commit to the TV app arena first will reap the rewards as the market continues to grow. Don’t just watch this space, get in it!

 

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Modern Life is Rubbish

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January 16, 2012

 

Last week saw the world’s tech lovers drawn to Las Vegas in their annual pilgrimage to the Computer Electronics Show (CES). Whilst What’s Hot would love to be checking out impressive new innovations from clever people, this year we have to settle for observing the reams of excited online content generated by the show.

Against a backdrop of worldwide austerity, there is in fact more amazing gadgetry on show than ever.

Samsung has been busy impressing even die-hard Apple fans, leading the technological revolution with its smart, connected TV products. Samsung’s OLED sets (that’s organic light-emitting diodes to you and I) with ultra-crisp picture and wafer-thin appearance have set tongues wagging, and both Samsung and LG are sounding the death knell for the humble remote, with voice and gesture controls taking over.

Inevitably, tablets are everywhere, but the new buzz is around ‘ultra-books’.  Critics say this is a dismal attempt by laptop manufacturers to win back some currency from the tablet players, or just MacBook Air copycats.  However, with machines such as the HP Envy 14 Spectre boasting some impressive technology, an interesting war might be on the horizon.

Moving swiftly from the sublime to the ridiculous, here’s something else that caught our eye. At What’s Hot we love to give new gadgets a chance, but we’re not sold on the LC Smart Manager fridge.  Priced at £2,000 it has an LCD touchscreen, camera and internet connection which means it can download recipes and link to online shopping services such as Ocado.

This scary piece of kitchen equipment comes with a range of capabilities, such as scanning your barcodes and receipts, monitoring its contents – even suggesting recipes based on the ingredients you have left. It can also switch on the oven to the correct temperature for said recipe via a wireless connection. Move over Delia.

Google is present, of course, pushing its TV offering and highlighting partnerships with large flatscreen manufacturers such as Vizio and Sony. 

Lastly, a nod to Ford in the US, and the announcement that it is bringing iHeartRadio to its vehicle line-up, allowing drivers to access the popular US radio service using voice commands.  Ford will be the first auto company to offer cars access to iHeartRadio, an app which features more than 800 of America’s top broadcast and digital-only stations, and allows users to create their own custom radio stations using particular artists and songs.

The Ford SYNC AppLink gives drivers hands-free control, access to local traffic reports via the phone’s GPS and a connection to Facebook timeline to allow music sharing with friends. Keep your hands on the wheel, sir!

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Little by Little

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July 25, 2011

This week sees the release of the Absolute Radio app on the Apple and Android operating systems. While ‘company releases app’ isn’t shocking news per se, it brings us nicely to a quick review of what’s happening, available and working well in the mobile space.

Mobile commerce is moving into the mainstream. As of June this year, 36% of Brits were using smartphones. With this comes a boom in mobile advertising. In 2011, eBay is expecting to generate $4 billion through its mobile proposition. The UK buys more vehicles and fashion via eBay mobile than any other product category. Other major retailers such as French Connection and New Look have invested heavily in m-commerce and this is notable against the backdrop of a declining high street.

The phenomenon of group deals is also flourishing thanks to mobile. Check-ins are fairly obvious: a café signs up to Facebook deals, for example, and users who check in to a specific branch get a half-price coffee. It gets more interesting when users are purchasing and redeeming vouchers from the likes of Groupon, LivingSocial, etc. through mobile devices. Any group deal app will need to display latest deals within the immediate vicinity of a user’s handset. This means local commerce is changing as is users hunger for local offers.

Users are responding to mobile ads. According to comScore, 28.8% of European mobile owners use their phone regularly for online browsing. Crucially, users are more responsive to mobile display ads than desktop or laptop banners. MediaMind reviewed more than 230 million mobile impressions including both mobile and browser, compared results and found that mobile banners recorded click through rates  nearly eight times higher.

This is in part explained by mobile banners occupying a larger proportion of the screen and often being the only ad on the page. But throw into the mix rich media streaming in video content and there’s no doubt that mobile banners can prove highly effective at encouraging click through or user interaction.

Mobile now offers so much more than banners. It is becoming as sophisticated as other more established digital channels and, as ever, technology is the driver. What’s HOT sees mobile as the natural platform for local and increasingly targeted ads.

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Half the World Away?

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July 25, 2011

We might not chat over the garden fence anymore, or even know our immediate neighbours, but it probably comes as no surprise that we are actually more social than ever, thanks of course to the continued march of the social web and the likes of Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, smartphones and Foursquare.

Where we are, what we are doing, what we’re consuming… many of us now like to tell the world, and guess what, brands are starting to listen, and in the best cases, are even joining the conversation.

Strategically, the social web is a place where, if a brand is useful, entertaining, engaging, it can generate ‘earned media value’ through the crowd propagating the brand’s message to others in their networks.   By smartly integrating channels such as Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube etc, a brand can build its ‘social graph’ so that, over time, advocacy becomes as, if not more, powerful than bought media reach.    In fact social media influence on purchases continues to grow, with recent IMRG data suggesting 20% of purchases are now directly impacted by social media groups, discussions or posts from brands.

But brands are only able to see a small part of the picture in the likes of Facebook. They typically cannot see and understand the relationships between their fans and their fans’ followers… if a fan likes them, does it follow that the rest of their network will too ?   And does this represent a bought media targeting opportunity ?

Step up a new age of online advertising networks that are promising to drive new customers by using data like this to identify who ‘truly connected’ within a certain network.  For example, there may not be much in common between the old secondary school friends who recently hooked up on Facebook, but there is lots between the two that regularly share YouTube video links.    It is these types of commonality that can now be understood and applied in social targeting.

Social targeting won’t completely change the digital advertising landscape but it will help to evolve advertising forwards and improve targeting yet further by making it more socially current.  Like retargeting (where tagging a user to a brand’s site means that they can be targeted elsewhere on their web travels with relevant messaging), seeking to understand shared beliefs and intention is a key dimension to making advertising more relevant.    If results from retargeting activity (analysis has shown up to 8 times better responses/interaction with retargeting) are anything to go by, we expect to social (re)targeting emerge as a strong contender for the performance-based online advertising pound.

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The Name of the Game

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May 12, 2011

From next month, we could start to see marketers investing hundreds of thousands of pounds to buy their own brand names as top-level domains. This might sound boring, but What’s Hot can assure you it’s not. A ‘top level domain’ is the bit after the ‘dot’ in a web address, where you’d normally find ‘.com’ or ‘.co.uk’. The result could be the beginning of web addresses that end in: ‘.nike’, ‘.sony’ and even ‘.asda’.

The news is based on an announcement by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the body that oversees the internet addresses. ICANN announced that next month it will outline its guidelines on brands buying these top level domains.
The rationale for this is that instead of brands having long sub domain addresses such as www.findaproperty.com/rent/lambeth/brixton, users will be able to find different products by visiting a much simpler (branded) top level domain such as brixton.findaprop.

Companies such as Canon, Hitachi, IBM and Unicef are expected to be the first to buy the unique domains  according to Brand Republic. However interest in this is far from universal. Motorola, for example, has insisted that it remains firmly committed to its existing site. Buying a top level domain will cost about $185,000 (£113,000) to register, as well as $25,000 (£15,000) a year in subscription and infrastructure costs.

Certainly there are benefits to large corporations with diverse business units that would be able to amalgamate their divisions under one domain, eg: mobile.sony, tv.sony, ps3.sony. However, there are lots of issues for a brand that wants to make these changes – most notably the reaction of users that have grown up with the ‘.com’ and ‘.co.uk’ domains. These are embedded in the psyche of the internet generation and any changes could cause confusion. To switch off ‘.com’ and ‘.co.uk’ would be extremely risky and brands would need to consider how they might align these with any move to a branded domain.

As well as buying the top level domains, brands will need to maintain them by having the right technical infrastructure. They will also need to migrate various business platforms over to the one domain as per the Sony example above.

Finally, brands need to consider key short- and medium-term concerns, such as extending their search keywords for PPC and SEO changes, and how they will raise consumer awareness of the new domains. In the end most brands will probably register a branded domain name and see how the market adapts before fully committing. In doing so, they will need to maintain their ‘.com’ and similar domains during any transitional period, and have a clear migration plan in place. The really interesting point will be when one leading brand takes the first step. What’s Hot is waiting with baited breath .

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Dancing Queen

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May 12, 2011

Emerald Street is a new daily e-newsletter from Shortlist Media, created by the journalists and editors of Stylist magazine. Will this daily e-mail be added to our future media plans and avoid subscribers’ junk mail folders? We think yes.

The email targets affluent young professionals who desire a daily dose of Stylist content. As the content is bespoke and not replicated from the magazine, it complements the weekly printed edition nicely. The illustrated email is filled with fashion, beauty, culture and entertainment recommendations that are even regionally targeted to recipients’ IP address. The daily themes are interesting, varied and very topical. Forthcoming sample sale dates and bar openings are our personal favourites.

For advertisers, Emerald Street offers direct links to purchase and incremental reach beyond press, giving daily contact with the Stylist audience over and above the weekly press insertion. We prefer this cross-platform package to the current basic Stylist.co.uk offering. The Stylist online readership is tiny so Emerald Street offers the digital reach we’ve been waiting for.

As with Stylist, Emerald Street is free to subscribe to yet contains high quality editorial content. We don’t see any reason why the recent success of Stylist magazine (420,000 circulation, up 3% YOY) can’t filter down to Emerald Street, as long as the commissioning of high quality bespoke content is maintained.
Yes, there are very similar daily newsletters in the market which reach much bigger numbers; Daily Candy and Urban Junkies. Unlike its typically American email counterparts, Emerald Street is a truly British creation and reaches a wider proportion of the UK vs. the London-only based Urban Junkies. Stylist outperforms a cluttered press market and we predict Emerald Street will do the same in digital.

The e-newsletter launched on 18th April and already reaches over 40,000 subscribers. A strong start given that the launch marketing campaign consisted of only one cover wrap, plus some editorial mentions in Stylist magazine.

John Lewis was the first week sponsor, running a solus advertising deal comprising of display, advertorials and partnership emails. The standout on the campaign was strong and we foresee simpler highstreet brands following suit, especially with current big Stylist advertisers.

That said, we still see plenty of room for improvement. The production quality is poor and currently images and (most importantly) the advertising space is cut off when the email is initially viewed. The ‘busy’ target audience will not click through to see the full content, especially if they are reading Emerald Street on a handheld device. But this aside, there’s lots to celebrate here and we can’t wait to see how it develops.

Until audited figures are released, we’ll continue to add Emerald Street to our press plans as added value only. Although we’re Emerald Street fans, we won’t pay for space until the production issues and exact incremental coverage is known. At the moment, Emerald Street is sitting in its big sisters shadow and has big stilettos to fill. Only time will tell.
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Testing Times

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September 2, 2010

What’s HOT has been following the Times paywall story with much interest. So far, News International has not revealed any information about traffic on its sites since the paywall was introduced or how much money it was generating, but ComScore data suggests that traffic has fallen by 27% since June and 42% since May (the pre-pay wall drop could be explained by all visitors being required to register for access to the site though they did not yet have to pay). This is considerable but the new figures are fuelling then debate.

In the search for a new revenue model, strategists at the Times have decided there is a better future in serving a small select audience of dedicated paying customers and providing a quality demographic to advertisers than a mass of passers-by. This strategy has worked for the FT.com and Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal (1.1m paying subscribers) but will this translate to non-business critical news?

Conversely to the Times, the Guardian remains outspoken in its commitment to retaining free content and even welcomed former Times online readers in a post-paywall article. It believes there is (or will be) value in a large number of people choosing to use Guardian content world-wide. How they monetise this broad brand approach is yet to be seen.

Clay Shirky notes: “When we talk about newspapers, we talk about them being critical for informing the public; we never say they’re critical for informing their customers. We assume that the value of the news ramifies outwards from the readership to society as a whole. But what Murdoch is signing up to do is to prevent that value from escaping. He wants to only inform his customers, he doesn’t want his stories to be shared and circulated widely. In fact, his ability to charge for the paywall is going to come down to his ability to lock the public out of the conversation convened by the Times.”

Blogger Malcolm Coles refers to the comparative sociability of the two sites post-paywall noting that for two similar stories posted at the same time the Times had 4 comments in 2 hours whilst the Guardian achieved 117 comments in 90 minutes.  Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales claimed the paywall had made the Times “irrelevant” with stories that cannot be tweeting or picked up by blogs; and is practically invisible on Google.

News International clearly recognise the importance of social media and as such are launching a social media campaign designed to recruit new readers online imminently.  They will hope to learn from this approach before they send the Sun and News of the World behind the paywall at the end of November.

What’s HOT looks forward to bringing you an update next month…

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Ofcom undressed

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September 2, 2010

A loud ‘thunk’ announced the arrival of Ofcom’s seventh annual Communications Market report caused by the impact of 379 pages hitting our desks. And while we are avid fans of data we thought we’d supply a trimmed down version of the main points to save you, our loyal readers, from such time consuming activities.

Time, therefore, seems a good starting point for our review. The modern day Briton now spends 45% of their waking hours interacting with some form of media or
communications, however this 7 hours of time soon jumps to 8 hours and 40 minutes of combined media usage. Multi-tasking is now a recognised norm for the modern Brit.

Linking multiple media usage is the seamless integration of digital – broadband penetration is up to 71% and digital tv to 92% and this has led to a jump in bundling of services under one provider with 17% now taking multiple services vs 3% just 5 years ago. This way of interacting with media has been propelled by the ‘smart’ phone, which
now accounts for a quarter of all handsets and has now become central to the Converging world. Those over 55 spend 57% of their time using for actual voice calls,
however for the digital natives under 24 that figure drops to less than 25% with text messaging and social networking accounting for a whopping 63% of usage.

Media multi-tasking is particularly relevant with pc (62%) and mobile usage (57%) most likely to be combined with other media, however combining media doesn’t necessarily
reduce the impact of messages – something backed up recently by the RABs intriguing research into radios effects on online browsing history.

Beyond these points the report is filled with every conceivable digital statistic.

Want to know the penetration of wireless routers in the
home? Head to page 11. (it’s 66% btw). Or how about
the proportion of media and lifestyle activity? (Figure
1.13, page 32). Maybe even the ownership of iPods in
Wales? (Figure 3.5, page 231).

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