Two specific topics came up again and again - what is our planning currency, and what is our measurement currency? Clearly better business cases and sharper understanding of ROI is getting more important. Everybody talked about that. Not one of the attendees put a hand up to ’spending more’ in 2009. In fact, it’s how to spend less, but get more. And this is where we need to think more clearly as an industry on what we do and how we do it, in order to decide and price our value. I worry that we measure ourselves often on how we do things rather than the absolute value of what we do. (we delivered the project on time - great. But what was it for, who was it for, why is it good, how many consumers does it influence, does it change behaviour?

if the role of marketing is to determine the market the brand will compete in and to manage the incremental growth or defence of share - what does the interactive activity do to support that? Ask yourselves the question. Let me know what you think.

Venture capitalists, start up’s, operators and established application developers sat closely alongside one another in San Francisco. I was one of a relatively small number of Europeans at the event, and it was clear to see the benefits of such a closely knit community both in terms of
collaboration and ideas. 

The topic talked about the most at Mobile 2.0 was what gives mobile applications the ‘X Factor’.

Many of the questions from the floor insinuated that many developers were still working hard to find sustainable business models for mobile. Many were looking at ad funded as the potential solution to their problem.

However the view from the VC panel was as clear as it was stark. Mobile applications which solely rely on advertising revenue are consistently failing to attract any interest from the Bay Area VC community. This is due to high levels of cynicism that mobile will be able to generate the CPM rates & volumes required to sustain a VC investable business.

“VC investable” is the key term here. All on the panel were at pains to state that many app developers will be able to create a business in Mobile via Ad funded, with the potential to scale to single figure millions of dollars per year. However, of course, the VC community are looking for exits of substantially more than that, and you got the sense everyone is still searching for the Mobile poster child company to emerge.

Secondly there was a detectable frustration with a lack of innovation coming through. Too many ideas being presented to the VC community were seen as line extensions, simply taking an existing concept and adding one or two new features - not breaking fresh ground or coming up with differentiated & unique propositions. This view was backed up by Sarah Lacey in her talk entitled “Secrets from Silicon Valley” held in London on 7th November.

An great tip for anyone going in front of these guys was be prepared for the “why now?” question. In these increasingly tough times the entrepreneur must be ready to convince the VC that they can’t afford to just sit back and let some other guy take the risk on their idea.

The theme of negativity on ad funded models was articulated by Tim Chang from Norwest Venture Partners, citing companies like GetJar who are building a sustainable business in Mobile. In anticipation of this focus on monitisable transactions, Tim was particularly supportive of micropayments and companies in the payments space.

I’m not an application developer though, so although the sweet spot for hot applications right now was compelling to see, what I found more insightful was the appetite for the industry to collaborate to create better things in the mobile 2.0 era.

I can see too that it will be important for Mobile operators like us to help bring customers and application developers together and step out of their way to let both parties get the most out of one another.

Consumers want cutting edge apps and developers want to reach an audience more easily. I see no reason why this won’t be the future model, and we will all be able to learn a lot from the journey.

It’s been a long journey and remarkable one, both for the American electorate and for the watching world. And especially of interest to us should be the textbook way that the Obama campaign used the internet to reach an electorate that was disengaged and opened a conversation on that electorate’s own terms.

By the time all the shouting is over it is expected that the campaign will have raised more than $1 billion via the internet, that’s 12 times the amount John Kerry raised in 2004. It was a campaign that used every digital touchpoint imaginable from the bespoke social network My Barack Obama to the Obama08 iphone app (left), from the offical Obama channel on YouTube to actively embracing YouTube fan/barely political films.

America was ready for a change, that’s certainly true, but this election result wasn’t a foregone conclusion. It would be naive to discount the coordinated and effective way that the Obama campaign used digital techologies to talk to people and make them feel genuinely part of the effort and campaign. And the way that the McCain campaign failed to.

There have been many successes using digital in the not-for-profit sector but it’s still an under-exploited medium. We need to learn as much as possible from the integrated and creative nature of the Obama campaign and apply the lessons learnt to our own public sector and not-for-profit clients, we should offer them a service as good as this and thanks to this campaign it shouldn’t be as difficult to convince them that integrated digital should be the centre of their campaigns.

*Props to anyone who can name the song my opening words were taken from.

I recall a few years back working with one interactive media course at a well known college helping introduce a module on information architecture. We also ran a competition where we gave students a tin of Quality Street (my agency at the time had the account) and setting a task to present an interactive competition for consumers about the brand. It was good fun, and perhaps not all that well thought out as a ‘brief for the nation’, but it remains a great example of legitimate relationship between the commercial and academic worlds to produce a result meaningful to both.

They wanted to know what skills we needed, and we wanted to know what they were teaching students who had expressed a sufficient interest in multimedia. I wonder if we have cracked this sufficiently in our sector. We all bleat about skills shortages, and about how there aren’t enough experienced people around. Let’s do something about that. Write to your MP. Write to me. Get involved. Stop complaining. Start doing.

And tell us if you feel your new employees can spell as well as code Silverlight.

There is NO ONE who is better placed to speak on this subject than Sarah Lacy. Over the last 5 years she has had unrivaled access to the founders of the companies that have shaped the Web 2.0 scene.

Now, for one afternoon only, she is London to share what she knows…

- 4.00pm Registration
- 4.30pm Fireside chat and audience Q&A with Sarah Lacy
- 5.30pm Networking and drinks
- 6.30pm Close

As a BIMA member, you get an exclusive discount on the event. Tickets are £20 (standard price is £25). Price includes a copy of Sarah’s book which you can collect at the event. There is also some money being put behind the bar for drinks. We anticipate that tickets will be sold out quickly so book now to avoid disappointment.

Sarah has reported on startups and venture capital in Silicon Valley for nearly a decade. Her first book, Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and Rise of Web 2.0, was published to critical acclaim in the US in May. According to Wired Magazine, “No other recent chronicle delivers such intimate, behind-the-scenes glimpses into Silicon Valley startup life.” The UK edition, The Stories of Facebook, Youtube, and Myspace: The People, the Hype and the Deals Behind the Giants of Web 2.0 will debut on November 3.

Lacy is a well - known fixture on the Valley scene. In addition to proper journalism awards, Nick Denton of Gawker called her “the hottest reporter in the tech world– ever,” TechCult called Lacy one of the 100 most famous people on the Web, and Playboy voted her one of the eight sexiest bloggers in the world.

Lacy also writes Valley Girl, a biweekly column for BusinessWeek and co-hosts Tech Ticker on Yahoo! Finance. She lives with her husband in San Francisco.

Robert Loch and I are playing host whilst Rob and Paul Carr ask all the tough questions as I relax by the bar.

Register now.

This event is sponsored by Fidelity Ventures:

Fidelity Ventures provides the expertise, resources and connections entrepreneurs need to take their business further, faster. With the ability to tap into Fidelity’s vast global network, Fidelity Ventures has proven a powerful partner for companies just entering the market as well as those ready for the next phase of growth. From identifying and delivering revenue opportunities, to offering insight on sales and marketing strategies and going global, Fidelity Ventures fully commits the talents, passion and energy of its people to the success of companies across industries.

The presentation will cover Virtual Earth, which is an integrated set of services that enable you to easily add mapping functionality to a website or back office application. In these sessions, the Microsoft team will provide a brief overview of Virtual Earth before presenting a showcase of some of the most innovative uses of the platform.

This event is free to Full Commercial and Associate members, and you are urged to register online now at the BIMA website to avoid disappointment. Places will be allocated on a first-come-first-served basis.

Register now.

Scary stuff.

Until recently digital agencies have been the guardians of the interactive world, delivering innovation to clients and taking real swathes of advertising revenue for online deliveries. Ad agencies on the other hand have been either buying up effective digital agencies or inserting digital teams into their offices to deliver solutions for clients. But neither of these approaches has allowed digital agencies a place at the table for strategy and development of client work - instead there has been an attitude that the planning (by which I mean the strategic planning of accounts including working out audience identification, projected media use, what will and will not speak to them etc) is done by the real professionals - the ad agency planners - and then the digital guys will come along and make a website.

This has let clients down because solutions have been proposed and sold in with no reference to digital teams and outmoded content delivery has made them look well, outdated (being polite).

Digital agencies as guardians have been offering clients that online and interactive support they need for their communcations. But digital agencies have failed to bring the back up and research to justify their pronouncements so clients have been left knowing they need digital, but not knowing what.

Above the line agencies are finally starting to realise that digital strategy has to come from people who understand digital - and so they are educating themselves to be those people. The danger for us is that they actually get really good at it. If that’s the case then digital agencies will be left as fulfillment houses, or become internal departments with little creative input into design and build. I don’t know about you but that wouldn’t make me leap out of bed in the morning.

But there’s still time. A real engagement with the online and interactive environment takes more than 5 immersion days, and there is a reason why we all work in the interactive arena - we love it. We love it more than any of the other public media available for creative people to get involved in. So we have a head start. And good planning is not as difficult to acheive as it might seem, we just have to attach the right importance to it and bring a digital sensibility to it so that large clients, familiar with the statistcs, research and vision that accompany pitches from ad agencies feel comfortable and at home with our propositions.

Perhaps we should take a leaf out of my friend’s company’s book and immerse ourselves in advertising…

The answer lies somewhere in the combination of ‘advertising’ thinking - building the case for a brand based on values and communicating those values through a series of tightly controlled advertisements to a theoretically specific audience - and ‘utility’ thinking - where you create a series of environments that provide functionality that helps the consumer in some way, through experiencing the context of the brand and what it stands for. For those of you who have been involved in interactive experience for many years, you may think isn’t that what we’ve been doing? Indeed it is, but now the ad people are involved, interaction has been rebranded ‘brand utility’. Neat, huh?

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One small problem though, is that it’s not quite so easy to create relevant and useful brand utility as the video above demonstrates. Like many terms of trend, it’s great to talk about, hard to do. I get the privileged view of both advertiser and web developer, as my organisation holds both ends of the stick. (Or both ends of the candle, depending on your point of view!)

Measurement is a good baseline for discussion - what it’s for,  who is it for, why in earth would anyone want to spend even a nanosecond doing whatever it is you’ve dreamed up - these are good things to set objectives around. Technology is another. Nothing works if you can’t make it happen, no matter what the idea is, and the role of the technologist is oft underplayed and undervalued by the agencies seeping into the discussion through what one Client recently described to me as the digital land grab.

Tech people are just as important as creative people in the new world. They should not be treated as production slaves, althoug it’s all too easy to let that happen. A case in point - not many big agencies (by which I mean the ones who would prefer to be making TV commercials) at the Future of Web Apps event recently, I noticed. Rachel from my place went, and she liked it so much she wrote about it on the participation marketing blog. Another case in point - the five nomination we’ve got for the BIMA awards all had technology at their heart, were complex tech projects as well as insightful and clever ideas with top results. This tech centricity is to be celebrated. I wonder how many agency people really get that.

Check out the video on the blog
http://fasterfuture.blogspot.com/2008/10/clay-shirky-on-humanising-brands.html

One particularly human activity - though it’s occasionally replicated in the animal world - is play. Games are complex, messy (do you cheat, how? why not? when and with whom do you play?) and they are a very effective way of developing relationships. Digital games are used more and more for different marketing purposes and in different ways.

Here are three completely different ones I am playing/engaged with at the moment:-

Righteous Kill - Casual gaming turns nasty to support the film
What is the Question? - Awareness-raising treasure hunt around the City of London in aid of extreme, drug-resistant TB
somebodyelsesphone.com - nokia market their new model phone through short form text/video/sound content

Play nicely - play messily. Enjoy your weekend!

The awards, which are now in their 13th year, recognize creativity in digital technology, and focus on all aspects of digital creativity. This year the awards have been refined to reflect the ever-changing digital media scene, with new sub-sections and categories being added.

Winners will be announced at a gala dinner at The Bloomsbury Club on November 27, 2008. Given that fewer trophys will be handed out on the night, we’ll just have to spend our time dancing into the early hours of the morning. Sigh.

The shortlist has been selected by a panel of expert judges, including Jon Sharpe, creative director and chief executive at Play; Richard Ogley, art director at BSkyB; and Tamara Gillan, managing director of spf15.

Shortlisted companies include AKQA, who secured a record 21 shortlists for work including Nike, Xbox and Unilever, and CHI & Partners, Poke and LBi – which are shortlisted for 5 awards each. Other companies up for awards include Agency Republic, Kempt, Avenue-A | Razorfish, MRM Worldwide UK, and GT.

Clare McDonald, Chair of the Awards Committee this year and Creative Director, Digital, at BSkyB said

This year, we refined the categories for entry. By introducing sub-sections like ‘Awesome Little Bit of Wickedness’ underneath nine core awards, the scope of submissions has become far wider. This refinement has resulted in a greater variety of entries from more areas of our industry. And, for the first time, the awards team was open to non-executives of which I’m proud to have been given the role as the first non-executive Chair. As such, on top of celebrating traditional creative, we have also short-listed a few more ‘unsung’ heroes.

The full 2008 shortlist can be found here.

I’d like to thank the awards committee and in particular, Clare and her team at BskyB, for the tremendous amount of creative work produced this year.

Tickets for the party are still on sale.

Although it will undoubtedly take time to establish a marketplace for our jobs, one that candidates from all types of company will naturally turn to when they think of a career move in digital, we hope you’ll agree that the goal of an effective recruitment site that is free for you to use is worth pursuing.

We can only attract and keep the interest of candidates if our ‘jobs’ section carries a good selection of interesting jobs. In the next couple weeks, in order to get the ball rolling, we will be contacting you to ask if we can copy any relevant jobs from your website onto the BIMA website. Once we have done that we will ask the PR agency to start actively promoting the section to make candidates more aware of it. We also plan to introduce a weekly jobs newsletter that candidates can sign up for and which will be emailed to them every Thursday.

Although we will load the first set of jobs for you we are asking members to load future jobs directly onto the BIMA website themselves. Please help us to make the website an effective recruitment medium for you and your fellow BIMA members.

To advertise please send your copy to – info@bima.co.uk and we will post it to the site for you. Jobs will normally remain on the site for 4 weeks but please do let us know if you fill the position or would like the job posted again for a further 4 weeks.

Personally I think they are doing the right thing  - you only have to look at McDonald’s 4 year strategy to be known for Salads to see that moving your brand towards the healthy is a sound strategy, it just frustrates me that even now digital communications are not being managed with a genuine understanding of the international nature of the web.

However the most important thing is that Pasta Hut can still be included in the children’s rhyme above which is of an course excellent guerilla marketing activation with a key target audience…

At the recent BIMA Breakfast Bites, Kerry Glazer, Chief Executive at AAR (the UK’s leading agency search, selection and relationship consultancy), offered a unique insight into client/agency relationships - looking at why they fail and how to reduce the risk of this happening.

To examine this in more detail, AAR commissioned a piece of research to include 26 clients and 20 agencies. The objective of this exercise was to source an overall impression of the quality of each participant’s client agency relationship, discover what factors are important to establish success, and gain insight into why these relationships fail.

Results showed that the majority of those surveyed believed that client agency relationships are managed fairly well, but that the main reason for failure was ‘avoidable’ reasons. The predominant feedback from both sides seemed to be a distinct failure to listen and lack of clarity.

Why does it go wrong? Looking at it from a client’s point of view, the four most common things that cause a relationship to disintegrate are:

• Failure to listen

• Agency inflexibility

• Stale thinking

• Lack of hunger

And from the agency perspective, the same is true, with the top four reasons being:

• Failure to listen

• Lack of hunger

• Client inflexibility

• Loss of focus and attention

Sound familiar? The results are most definitely interesting - as they show that both clients and agencies are thinking along the same lines, with a distinct awareness of why a relationship is doomed. But the question is – does anyone look out for the early warning signs? Or do we all wait until the final straw, and begrudgingly say goodbye without a word because we didn’t do anything about it?

Relationships can fail for various reasons, and if these problems are not recognised and dealt with, you get caught up in a downward spiral with a very slim chance of redeeming yourself. For a client, it seems the ultimate call for a failing relationship is when there is:

• Poor agency response

• Change of client personnel

• Agency personnel issues

There are a lot of ways to prevent potential issues. Looking at the research findings, it becomes clear that the key points to positively managing a good client agency relationship are:

• Set clear expectations/ roles

• Establishing and maintaining excellent senior relationships

• Structured relationships are more likely to last

• Clear communication

For clients, things can quickly go wrong when there is a lack of delivery and poor understanding of their business. In order to avoid this, clients need to think of agencies as clients too, and get them involved in their business.

If agencies establish and maintain strong client relationships (& vice versa), understand the brief that they are being given (clarify & ask questions) and deliver what is expected of them by setting clear expectations – they are off to a very good start. A big mistake is when an agency thinks its all going well because they connect with a client on a personal level. The truth is, if you’re not delivering what you are being paid to do, you will soon find the ‘liquid lunches’ coming to an end.

A final point to remember is that clients who work in a productive way with the right agency for their needs can fundamentally affect the success of their brand or service. So what is the ground for a solid client /agency relationship? In short, the answer lies in good partnership, and that works both ways.

In his talk to a captivated agency-centric audience, Chris emphasised that while organic growth always makes great economical sense, in an economic downturn, it is essential. He outlined several key points to developing an organic growth strategy:

1. it is ultimately more profitable, there’s less ramp up time and the team is already familiar with the client, industry, etc. Plus, the risk attached to new business is reduced
2. your best credentials with a current client are obviously the fantastic work you’ve already done together
3. can help move from a project by project based affair to a long-term sustained relationship

Chris highlighted a few factors that regularly get in the way of organisations creating a proper organic growth strategy, such as time, lack of “sexy factor” versus the rock-and-rollah lifestyle of the “new business team”, lacks its own budget and lead.

He suggests the following when crafting your plan. Focus focus focus. Keep a clear focus on what your agency does well. Don’t dabble in everything. Many agencies lose sight of what they are good at and suddenly have a case study on their website for just about anything, including those obscure one off projects from 10 years previous. Be clear about your strengths when discussing your service offering. Identify your top clients and then dig deep. Follow the leader. A team must be created that has ownership of organic development. Also, it must be led from the top to get the proper resources allocated to it (time, budget, people). Emphasise with the client. He quoted that all too often agencies look through their own lenses and sell the client what the agency believes it is good at without finding out or listening to the client’s actual needs. In other words: stop selling and start listening, folks!

Also some gems that while might seem like common sense, all too frequently are forgotten, like make sure the scale of the opportunity is weighted toward your skills; that the opportunity is of strategic significance to what your organisation’s goals are; that it’s a cultural fit and the teams all have good chemistry together!
Here are a few cheat sheet top tips:

1. Do a once over on your client list, get rid of loss clients and focus on the most rewarding accounts
2. Audit your current accounts to see what your most successful service offerings are…what it is you’re actually doing the most of, best of, etc and if it’s not a 7 or higher on a 1 to 10 scale, say goodbye
3. Make friends with procurement
4. Evaluate your external and internal strategy for client on-sell
5. Create milestones, and for god’s sake, don’t send out that agency newsletter, the client doesn’t care unless it’s personalised to them and relevantTeam team team, make sure the team is the best team for the job
6. Get out there and figure out what your client is actually interested in, reading, doing, etc.
7. Apply your already in place new business tools to your organic growth programme

There was a lively debate post the chat from Chris, and one question in particular stands out. Q: Should a company prospect and work with a client in the first year, knowing that it might be a loss lead relationship initially? The answer naturally is that each agency would have to determine what they could invest in such a relationship but that organic or traditional business development of this nature should be considered just that — an investment — and a proper budget should be set up with allocated resource.

Chris, hats off to you for the informative and fun Breakfast Bite. Thank you and we hope you enjoyed the delicious Soho House bacon butties.

Under each brand name it categorises what social media marketing they are using and links to their site(s). Handy!

There are mostly American brands on there but the things they are doing are not all off-the-scale for sophistication. Plenty of time to play catch-up. Many do blogs, micro blogs, social network membership, online video, wikis, podcasts, brand monitoring and widgets. Nothing we can’t all use / produce for our clients.

The list gave me some insights. Did you know that BA has a Twitter account? And IBM publishes its corporate strategy for social computing?

Peter Kim compiled the list with help from a lot of very influential friends. Last updated in October 2008.

Why do I ask? Well the reason is that I’m speaking at the Interactive Marketing Show in Manchester Nov 08 and will be talking about some of the best online campaigns and latest trends. So, if your agency or someone you admire in our wonderful industry has done something remarkable recently, then let me know and if it is truly outstanding then I’ll showcase it!

I look forward to hearing from you…

Mirage

For more info about the show: http://www.interactivemarketingshow.com/

My own feeling is that when things get economically difficult the tendency is to revert to what you know. In the case of marketing managers that might lead them to revert to the old standards, particularly towards direct marketing and away from digital. You need only to look at Google’s UK ad revenues, which have suffered their first-ever sequential quarterly revenue decline, to see that something along these lines is already happening.

However, digital is enough entrenched in the marketing mix now that it will undoubtedly be retained, if not at current levels.

In addition, three key things that digital offers above other media in a constrained financial market are

• dialogue - Engaging with customers builds brand loyalty, which in recession is more important than ever because it highlights another dimension in the purchase equation taking focus away from cost.
• the ability to target effectively and accurately - meaning that you can be more certain about engaging the right customers in the right conversation
• high levels of measurability- finally, in a recession everyone wants/needs to justify their purchase decisions. Whether we like it or not statistics and numbers are immeasurably pleasing to marketing managers - and actually if our content is great won’t the statistics reflect that anyway?

In other words, digital has the components that make direct marketing a popular retrenching position when finance is constrained, but with the killer difference that you can actually talk with your potential clients rather than shouting at them and just hoping they take any notice of anything you have said.

I am sure our industry will be buffeted like all the others in this economic downturn, but digital is in a very good position to rise to the challenge.

Here are a couple of thought provoking articles I found in my search:-

NetImperative - Digital to thrive in a potential recession?
The Drum - Can digital skip credit crunch?
Jemima Kiss at The Guardian - Web publishers brace themselves for the downturn, although confusingly it was followed 7 minutes later by this Digital is still growing.

A unique insight into client agency relationships - why they fail and how to reduce the risk

Speaker: Kerry Glazer, Chief Executive, AAR

• Date: Wednesday 8th October 2008
• Time: 08:30 - 10:00 hrs
• Venue: Soho House Members’ Club, 21 Old Compton Street London W1

Join your colleagues and friends over breakfast and hear Kerry’s thoughts on:

• Why things go wrong and how to avoid it. Achieving and maintaining successful relationships is of critical importance to both clients and agencies.
• For clients, appointing and working in a productive way with the right agency for their needs can fundamentally affect the success of their brand or service, and the communications that promote or support that brand or service.
• For agencies, forging successful and enduring relationships with their clients gives the agency stability, adds to their credentials and experience and, very often, creates circumstances whereby they can do their best work.

For clients, appointing and working in a productive way with the right agency for their needs can fundamentally affect the success of their brand or service, and the communications that promote or support that brand or service.

For agencies, forging successful and enduring relationships with their clients gives the agency stability, adds to their credentials and experience and, very often, creates circumstances whereby they can do their best work.

So why do so many client/agency relationships, which start out with the intention of achieving the above, go so wrong, so frequently?

In order to gain more knowledge and insight into this phenomenon, AAR has commissioned a significant piece of qualitative research to examine these relationships in depth. Hear the debrief on the findings of the research, together with some suggestions as to how you can substantially reduce the risk of relationship failure.

About Kerry

Kerry has worked in the communications agency business for the last two decades, with stints in at JWT, WCRS, Limbo (BBH) and Kendall Tarrant (now The Talent Business) during that period. She joined AAR (the UK’s leading agency search, selection and relationship consultancy) as Commercial Director in 1999, was promoted to Managing Director of the company in November 2000 and then to Chief Executive in February 2006. Kerry is a member of Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply, the Direct Marketing Society, the Marketing Society, Women in Advertising and Communications (Wacl) and sits also on the CIPS Specialist Knowledge Group for Marketing and the Support Committee for NABS.

Register now

Please note that this event is for BIMA Full Commercial and Associate Commercial members only and has a limited attendance. Places will be allocated on a first-come-first-served basis.

Date: 30th Sep 2008
Time: 13:00 to 16:00 hrs
Member Price: free
Venue: Microsoft Offices
Address: Cardinal Place London

Tickets are flying since we sent out an email yesterday so you need to be very quick if you don’t want to miss out. Sign up now.

If you’re a brand and would like to work with BIMA on a similar project to help raise awareness around your partnership programme or technology, please feel free to get in touch.

Who likes Weebl and Bob? If you don’t know them then I suggest you visit the site right away for some very amusing and clever animations. They were the animators of Cadbury’s Creme Egg rip offs of film this year at Easter. Recently they did a version of the video for Destroy by Ladytron which was very funny. As a result of this animation I have got very interested in Ladytron, the song Destroy is great. I haven’t yet bought anything, no money has changed hands, but the chances were high that it would.

But now i’m not so sure. The site has been told to take the animation off by Ladytron’s management.

I’m not going to make any comments on the legality, appropriateness or otherwise of weebl and bob doing what they did but I will say that the digital industry and music industry have to start to have a proper dialogue about how IP is managed in the digital environment. It has to be a conversation that acknowledges that the world has changed and that business models need to change to keep up with it, to follow users, to be alongside them on the journey and find new models that might be even better than the existing ones otherwise the public and the innovators will find new models for them.

There is a great opportunity here for us because we understand the digital market place and online consumers and we are more likely to understand digital natives that genuinely see no problems in sharing music and have flexible expectations of how media mashes.

We also need to help them understand that in a digital world things that can be easily copied have little value, things that can’t (and are therefore scarce) have great value. It’s just supply and demand. Tracks have little value - Artists have massive value. Record companies have access to both of these assets, but they are sweating the wrong ones.

But don’t just take my word for it. I recommend you go and check out Terry McBride’s blog or this article on IP Democracy that will give you more insight into what a forward thinking music producer thinks about all this stuff. It’s an interesting and fruitful area for thought and digital business.

This focus on customer satisfaction and customer experience has been the cornerstone of O2’s recent success in the UK market. However this focus on quality can come at a price. Speed to market and consistent innovation is challenging when you operate within a risk adverse, quality first, environment.

Their light bulb moment was observing the behaviour of internet companies who know nothing else but Beta testing with customers and following agile development processes – it’s in their DNA as entrepreneurial young businesses. So they wanted to create a way to allow application developers to interact directly with their high value customers. I feel this collaborative approach is the only model to drive innovation and adoption of mobile data services. In fact, I must declare my interest - I’ve been working with O2 on this project.

Therefore it is a significant step in the world of telco to launch a Beta service with the coming of O2 Litmus. They do this with the intention of another first, effectively turning O2 Litmus over to the community of its users, allowing them to shape future iterations.

What is O2 Litmus? It has been developed to address four key objectives:

1. Develop a way to drive mobile innovation and provide a fast route to market for successful applications
2. Create an ecosystem where all players in the value chain benefit. Developers have to be able to make money via O2 Litmus.
3. Find new ways to provide O2 customers with unique experiences, building on the success of The O2 venue and the iPhone.
4. Empower their leading edge customers – put them in the driving seat to help set the future direction of O2’s mobile data services.

O2 Litmus will provide the framework for collaboration, co-creation and experimentation between developers and O2 customers. I hope a move on this scale can only be good for the digital industry as a whole, by driving awareness and an appetite for the co-creation approach.

If you would like to be part of the journey, please register at at www.o2litmus.co.uk

Deeply experienced and widely networked Product Management Executive, with an 18 year background in Fixed Internet, Mobile Messaging, Mobile Data Services, and Information Technology.

James spent 5 years working in BT Openworld in various product, commercial and business development roles, joining BT Wireless in July 2000 to help develop BT’s 3G strategy.

With a proven delivery & innovation track record, James has reinforced O2’s position as mobile data market leaders via the successful delivery of over 25 major products & service platforms, featuring 20 UK market firsts.

Including MMS, Kodak Mobile, Mobile Video, the UK DVB-H Broadcast TV Trial, Mobile Music Streaming and Downloads, and the Ticketing & Interactive services within The O2, Europe’s premier music & sporting arena (see www.theo2.co.uk) which won the “Best Use of Mobile” award at the 2007 UK Interactive Marketing and Advertising Awards.

Currently focusing on New Product Development and Innovation at O2 UK, owning and delivering new capability build for non voice services and driving data service innovation across the business.

James also lectures at The University of Oxford Faculty of Continuing Education, and Reading University.

I was prompted by the post below to remind you that we still need to think about the skills sets across the board in our industry. Even tougher economic conditions do not mean that suddenly, the skills shortage will miraculously disappear. We need more clever people who can invent, manage, develop, code and articulate the value of what all our businesses do. We need to make sure that the experiences gained in our companies provide better quality opinion and capability for the next project. We continue to need leadership and a sense of belonging to an industry that is still, let’s not forget, around ten years old. Simply being digital doesn’t mean you’re good. You have to have benchmarks as well as belief. Many of the multinationals will train their talent over time with the ‘learnings’ (as they say in Unilever world) you are bringing to bear now. Because whilst consumers have adopted digital behaviours, the world of marketing remains unclear about how best to organise to deliver the promise of digital.

Who has the right answers? That depends on who you were before you thought digital was important. There’s an old Irish joke about directions which goes something like ‘to get there, I wouldn’t be starting from here’. If you were a direct marketer, you claim it’s all about results and responses and contact strategies and accountability, and the web makes it easier to do all that. The reality is that it actually makes it rather harder since it exposes (on occasion) the minimal effectiveness of previous campaigns, and (on occasion) the difficulty of finding a common measurement metric across all areas of the marketing mix.  These two things may be, unsurprisingly, related.

Different agencies claim to have the answers. We obviously, have them all at mrm worldwide :-)  but credit is due to the efforts clients that actually need business results have made in pulling together a better balance of investment between search, display, and affiliates for example. There is a structural problem in the industry, in that the supply chain has pulled media planning and creative planning apart. Ironically, the digital marketing community is pushing hardest for that bridge to be crossed as everyone with a degree of experience understands that better work comes about as a result, in online campaigns at least. This is a specific detail that, in ‘normal digital’ campaign working, the advice of experts is sought, and requires specialism to deliver.

Where is it all going? I look forward to seeing the BIMA awards results, which I am sure some of the readers of this blog were busily putting to bed over the weekend. I do applaud the efforts to reshape these awards to celebrate the complexity of what we do, since it is enormously complex to make digital normal. And sometimes, we need to celebrate the work that isn’t ordinary along the way.

Dynamo London has given us two free tickets (worth £70 each) to this year’s idesign conference which takes place on the 17th September at the South Bank Centre.

It’s All About Meaningful Interaction…
Celebrating, showcasing, exploring and debating the best in interactive design, the idesign programme and line-up of industry heavyweights is designed to inspire and inform.

idesign 08 is part of the London Design Festival’s Digital Design Day.

The first two people to leave a comment will get a ticket each.

So, at BIMA we are rising to the challenge and will be ‘Inspiring Future Talent’ from the the grass roots up! The plan is to engage with audiences from Schools, Academies and Universities working closely with the Digital Media Industry.

The first of our activities will be a Digital Challenge for schools nationwide and this is something that all BIMA members can get involved in, if you’re interested and you should be, then please get in touch at education@bima.co.uk.

Our mission - to bridge the gap between the education sector and the digital media industry with a view to ideas generation and knowledge transfer.

We will be pulling together some the most forward thinking brands, inspiring individuals from industry and innovative practitioners in the education sector to drive this forward.

We have set up a committee to focus on driving this initiative forward of which I, Mirage Islam, am the Chair my current and last role - Contributing Editor at Contagious Magazine and previously Future Media Lead at BSkyB - allows me to take knowledge gained and apply it to this major initiative. I’m delighted that BIMA’s chair Paul Walsh is fully supportive and the team, with a wealth of experience, comprises of Hal Robinson MD of Librios, Ann Jamieson MD at Price Jamieson now Aquent , Michael Collins MD i-Publishing and Andrew Henning CEO at Redweb Ltd.

BIMA are driving this agenda forward, if you are passionate about making a difference then let us know at education@bima.co.uk

With a newly elected Executive committee, and under my final year as Chair, BIMA is increasing its focus on marketing communications. The association will be using Six Degrees to help promote its aims, communicate better with members, raise the BIMA awards profile, promote its recently formed member committee working groups (Awards, Communications, Website, Events, Education, Standards & Best Practices, etc.), and drive general awareness and membership.

Julie Lane, Vice Chair of BIMA (who’s sunning herself in Hawaii leaving me to publish this post on her behalf)

BIMA has an aggressive marketing agenda this year and we are very much looking forward to raising our profile by working in partnership with Six Degrees, a highly strategic and buzz-centric communications agency. We are confident Six Degrees can help us promote dialogue within the interactive media industry while spreading the word about some of the fantastic programmes we are putting in place for our members. These include training, networking and recruitment. As we work to support the creative excellence and craftsmanship within digital media, we know Six Degrees will ensure that our message is out there.

Jennifer Janson, Managing Director, Six Degrees, says,

We are really looking forward to helping BIMA generate the attention it deserves. What attracted us to the association is its true independence, and the ability to fly the flag for creativity across the industry as a whole. Digital marketing is quickly becoming the central hub for marketing creativity, marking a shift in the industry unlike any other we’ve seen before. We believe BIMA has a critical role to play in the new marketing world

Follow Vikki on Twitter - if you’re really bored, follow me on Twitter to get breaking news even before it’s publish on the blog.

About Six Degrees

Six Degrees is an award-winning UK-based PR agency. The company has an unusual mix of well-established multinationals and high-growth, fast-moving start-ups as clients. The common theme is that all are technology-based businesses.

Six Degrees consultants combine in-depth knowledge of trends, issues and technologies with first-class writing skills, and excellent media, analyst and blogger contacts. All designed to deliver results that drive clients’ businesses forward.

Six Degrees is a member of Eurocom PR, an international PR network of independent PR specialist operators with a global reach and a unified approach to campaign management and message delivery.

As a control test, I searched for ‘minimise-me’, MRM Worldwide UK’s latest work for Windows Live Messenger, and the URL www.minimise-me.com is number 1 link, as indeed are all the following links (on Google). I was amazed to find that minimise-me and the personalisable emoticons dominated the top 100 search listings - literally, 90+ of the top 100.

Both these campaigns broke around the same time, with probably very different budgets and indeed objectives. If getting online ‘buzz’ was an objective for both campaigns (quite possible), I’d have to say Windows Live Messenger is winning by a country mile. You can see pictures at www.participationmarketing.co.uk. So which is the more clever campaign?