Tag Archives: what’s hot

Game-on

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September 2, 2010

If you’ve been watching the acquisition trail being blazed by EA, Google (allegedly) and Disney in recent months, you’ll be getting a feeling that the world of interactive, social entertainment is about to make another giant step. Once the preserve of basic TicTacToe and Solitaire type quick fixes, which were typically played solus or at best with basic online play and chat facility, ‘casual gaming’ is not so much out to pasture, more booming in a new, shiny coat in Farmville!! Social gaming is here to stay.

Some anecdotal observations…time spent with computer and video games has increased markedly over the last few years, with both ends of the spectrum (hardcore and more casual) fed by innovation in technology, from the ‘taking gaming off the screen and into your hand’ type massmarket success of the Wii to the amazing graphical advances and sheer open scale of experiences on the PS3. And whether console or PC, or mobile or iPad, there’s no doubting that playing games will continue to pervade our lives…Google (allegedly!) and social gaming makes for an interesting if not scary prospect, EA clearly sees a future on social platforms such as Facebook as the wild days of huge console-based boxed content revenue recedes, and the might of Disney the brand behind a raft of social games seeking to no doubt take its huge franchises to an ever broader platform of access points is a sign of things to come.

So what of this in terms of the7stars’ thinking around the media opportunities that are emerging? Engagement is very much still the zeitgeist, and no more so than in games. We lean forward, we immerse ourselves in new worlds, we engage and problem-solve and we relish the next task-reward conquest in Angry Birds (grrrr!).

In a simple media planning context, more eyeballs are shifting away from traditional media so brands would be silly not to consider this unique engagement opportunity. But we need to evolve our thinking beyond the media plan reach vanity of slapping irritating, possibly interruptive advertising in games, to a more sane understanding of how engagement plays out and where a brand can thus add value to the experience.

Providing new content as a reward (racing an unlockable Porsche GT3RS in GT5… hmmm) for carrying out and completing a task thus extending the game experience and value, creating added realism in the right context (Samsung smartphone as a navigation device in Grand Theft Auto) and, yes, a tailored advertising message or offer on dynamically-served billboards in online connected games, are the angles that brands must take to engage with this highly elusive, valuable audience on their terms.

Sharing and collaborating around content creation, crowd-sourced challenges and other social web-native activities are all platforms from which brands might build engagement value. As ever the threat of commoditisation looms…too much inventory blighting our experiences will likely occur in some if not many instances.

A message to brands…the gaming community is one of the oldest, most established and advanced online communities that was creating and sharing content when ‘UGC’ was just a cinema chain. Entertain in new and innovative ways and you might just get extended play.

Game on indeed…

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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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Home Alone

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September 2, 2010

The ABC figures for January to June 2010 (released on 12/08) represent fairly mixed results for the consumer magazine market…

Home interest – Perhaps unsurprisingly, home titles seemed to be the least affected by the recession -  circulations have either increased or remained static POP showing that people are still investing in property interiors. As the recession effect continues, this is a trend we predict will continue.

Travel – Travel mags continue to be used as a research tool as consumers spend longer planning and shopping around for the best holiday deals. BBC Lonely planet has seen phenomenal 35% YOY growth. However we question whether this growth can be sustained during the year?

Music –This category is among one of the worst hit sectors. Just two titles are able to boast a slight increase in circulation, while most titles suffered hefty losses , this is thought to be a result of readers moving away from print formats in favor of looking on the web for music news and reviews.

Men’s Lifestyle – It is a tale of two business models in this sector, with free titles taking up the top two positions once again, while paid-for titles struggling to keep the pace, Nat mag’s Esquire was one of the only exceptions after posting a 10.3% YOY increase.

TV Listings -  Most titles in this sector  have lost readers in the last 6 months. Only two TV mags saw a year on year increase – TV & Satellite Week and Total TV Guide, indicating the electronic program guide available on digital set top boxes replaced the paper format?

Women’s Monthlies - This sector showed mixed results, with the market as a whole increasing 5.58% YOY. ABC movement within this sector heavily depends on publisher investment, covermounts and bulks. Solid and consistent performance is rare in this sector.

Women’s Weeklies – Like the monthlies, this sector was also a mixed bag, although New! and Star enjoyed an impressive year on year boost to their circulations.  OK! magazine suffered a hefty decline this period.

In general the latest ABC data has seen mixed results by sector. Both the digital landscape plus current economic climate have dictated which sectors do well.

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Porn Again

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September 2, 2010

Richard Desmond is a smart media operator and his achievements at Express Newspapers are the subject of business text books, so we are truly baffled by his decision to buy Five from RTL for a reported £103m.

He might be the king of media turnarounds but turning around this ailing TV station will be no mean feat.

Last year Five lost in excess of £35m  on an operating income of a little over £200m, in our opinion even with a bit of recovery in the TV market, no amount of cost cutting is going to make up this difference without impacting the very fabric of the station.

And herein lies the rub, Five is a small TV station entirely reliant on advertising revenue for survival. To grow that revenue it needs bigger and better audiences, but in an increasingly digital world the cost of growing those audiences is getting more expensive and arguably more risky, so unless the team at Northern and Shell have a new formula for making great TV shows, you’ll understand our skepticism.

There has been much talk about investing in the programme budget, maybe taking over the Big Brother franchise from C4 and introducing a new level of cross promotion on Desmond’s TV and Print products, but we don’t buy this and it flies in the face of the way that TV advertising is bought and sold. ITV, C4 and Sky have spent years building their audience base and trading strategy. They’ve also invested heavily in developing a whole story around the relative strengths, weaknesses and sub audience segmentations across their portfolio channels.  Five has always struggled to define their place in this world – building a franchise based on football, films and f**ing (for those old enough to remember) is hardly a proposition that endures.

So unless Desmond has a cunning plan to persuade the big agency groups to back him we don’t believe he can achieve the sort of success he did 10 years ago with the Express. Nonetheless we have to admire his chutzpah and wish him and his team every success, competition in the TV market is to be encouraged and please keep the gadget show going – we love it!

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Four-where?

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September 2, 2010

At last Facebook’s location-based service (LBS) has been revealed and launched in the US. Places allows users to “check-in” to nearby locations, such as Restaurants, Cinemas, shops, parks, workplaces etc. Facebook’s first competitive move against other location-based services such as Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp and Mytown.

Rumoured in the industry for a while, the arrival of Places seems somewhat late. However, Facebook has something that the others don’t – 500million users! Foursquare has been the LBS leader with 3million users worldwide and the others are in their hundreds of thousands. Although these users are biased to the US, they have created and developed a new way for marketers to communicate and reward users. Foursquare rewards users with badges and for the most frequently visited locations, a “Mayorship” award to which location owners can give away “free coffee” or “a glass of wine with a main meal”. While most of this can be seen as egotistical (presuming you share) it gives the user a sense of achievement and an incentive to revisit. Gowalla has created “trips”; The London pub crawl, Manchester Football stadiums Tour, The London Tourist Trot etc, for users to complete, unlocking achievements. Meanwhile Yelp encourages users to post reviews and rate services/places for others to base their decision on and MyTown fuses social gaming and LBS to allow users to buy their own town – almost like a real life Monopoly game!

Strangely perhaps Facebook Places does none of this. There are no incentives and arguably it brings a risk of check-in fatigue. In fact, all that Facebook Places is doing is bringing location-based services to the masses. So maybe the others have nothing to sweat about, and this is going to help their industry? The day after Places launched, Foursquare received the highest number of one day sign-ups ever. This could just be a coincidence – something to do with an article from The Times publicizing the top Foursquares Mayors, or the beginnings of LBS breaking into broader user base. Facebook is not just doing this for the market though.

Within 48hrs of revealing Places, Facebook announced the acquisition of Hot-potato, and this week is rumoured to be also acquiring Hotlist. Hot-potato is a service that helps people socialize around live events and share what they’re doing with friends. Although the purpose of the buy is currently un-clear, Facebook will inevitably be using this to develop the status updates within Places. Hotlist is an aggregator of trending places and has been described as “Facebook Events on steroids” providing event analysis including gender and age breakdowns.

So what does this mean for marketing? Targeting and Timing. There is already a wealth of information on Facebook for marketers to use, Places takes this a step further. Check-ins will be crossed referenced with user profiles providing data never before accessible. With 70% of Facebook Logins happening over mobile – Facebook will have to come with an ad-module fit for mobile users creating another real-time platform for marketers to target people.

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