The POOL - Network of advertisers

A large group of advertisers, brands, and online distribution portals, led by Starcom MediaVest Group and Vivaki Nerve Centre are joining together to create industry standards for new advertsing models, specifically focused on digtal distribution.

Many advertisers, brands, and content portals have been complaining for years of a lack of standards for the placement/packaging of advertising for content, on-line, and any other digital platform that presents an opportunity or landscape to have content/information delivered to an audience.

The "Pool" as it is called, brings standards to a collection of media "pooled together" for media buyers & agencies to choose from for added vaclinet value.

Starcom MediaVest Group and Vivaki , both led by Curt Hecht of Vivaki, will spearhead thr group and industry standards for online/digital ad-buys.

Starcom's advertising clients, that include Allstate, Applebee’s, Capital One and Nestle Purina, will be paired with content partners Broadband Enterprises, CBS Interactive, Discovery Communications, Hulu.com, Microsoft Advertising, Platform A and Yahoo!, to name a few, with the sole goal of streamlining and organizing the structure for digital ad-buys.

This is both strong and good news for content owners and creators who could possibly recieve a better accounting and higher ROI for their contemt, and on-line portals, who would recieve top dollar for their digita real estate.

If done right it could be win-win for all involved "POOL" parties, but if the standards are not managed effectively, it could creat more confusion and hysteria to an already, at times, confused space.

Lets hope for the win-win.

Is Mobile TV finally hit the U.S. - Let's wait to see numbers on market penetration first!

This week brought a huge announcement from a group of major TV stations at the annual CES in Las Vegas, commonly known as the Open Mobile Video Coalition. The "Coalition's" goal was to showcase and roll out some of the latest streaming TV options for consumers, and detail a snapshot of things to come. As everything in digital moves at light speed in a down market, the price point and entry into market for consumers to try and sample all of the offerings from the OMVC is hard not to try, because the price is FREE. As a way to entice and lure more people into the mobile TV space the coalition has been active in promoting great new devices from major manufacturers like LG Electronics, Kenwood (only mobile TV units in cars), The Harris Corp., Samsung and Delphi.

One of the major companies, LG, said it will offer up to five new products, all that will be capable of getting the standard Mobile DTV signals.

Currently in Asian countries where mobile TV has been active in consumers lives for awhile, the business model revolves from premium paid services to a'la carte and many offering of advertising sponsored content.

With the announcement yesterday it seems a like a solid way to introduce mobile TV, through advertising and sponsored programming, but then other issues come into play that sometimes people do not spend enough time on. The environment for mobile in U.S. cities. With geo-targeted advertising taking shape all over the country, U.S. consumers still are not as heavy users as there European and Asian counterparts, and this is where the environment issues comes into play. I many Asian and European cities transit is healthy, in the U.S., still many people are tied to their cars, which lowers the amounts of time people will spend watching, and which in-turn provides less revenue form advertising.

All n all, yesterday announcement was extremely positive, now we just need to change more of our habits, have better devices, and get ready to welcome one of the next best revenue generators in digital media, Mobile TV and all of the options of interactivity that comes with it.

Closed social networks the next fad? Maybe so...

As social networking expands, the niche aspect and sexiness of "select" & "exclusive" takes on a whole new turn as businesses get more into the social media thing through the usual suspects of Facebook, MySpace, etc... to engage their customers with "special offers'' that you need to sign up on the page for. Exclusive clubs go back a long time, and there are many on-line now like Small World http://www.asmallworld.net/login.php, and Black Card Cirlce https://www.blackcardcircle.com/, but the opportunity for companies, specifically in this hotels, takes the business model to a whole new place.

It is a way to take the LinkedIn style of networking to a whole new place that allows for more interaction, such as what the Pod hotels are doing with exclusive meet-ups for people staybing in their hotels, in some cases, planning to meet weeks in advance. This same exclusive group model can lend itself to so many ideas, such as any thing that is a chain or linked in group that provides opportunities to get together in other cities, while keeping exclusive company.

B2B Conferences take hit in down economy

Bound to happen, conferences and trade shows take hit as B2B events downscale as less companies look for other ways to get businesses talking to each other. This decision will definitely have reverberation in many ways, not just opportunities for business people to meet on their specific industry, catering, hotels, et al...

This could also be one one of the big reasons that MAC World will make next year their last, with CES definetely happy as they happen at the same time.

As companies test and samples new ways to reach their core constituency, B2B will always be around but will re-engineer itself as it looks to new ways to engage companies and clients, with the most likely avenue being web seminars ona regular basis, less glamaourus meet-ups and scaled down events, and possibly bi-yearly conferences.

Any way that it goes, conferences and events targeted towards the B2B market and in connecting business are core to... well business. They are needed, but hopefully they return and remain in a way not just focused on digital models as those sponosred parties are always a nice place to meet and discuss business.

MINI continues to innovate in advertising

This is a great story. Innovation in advertising, which in some cases translates to content. A German advertising agency has created a MINI ad that brings to life - literally - the new convertible that MINI is launching in Europe. A German company created a technology called Metaio, which is a form of augmented reality. The user takes the advertising out of the magazine and places it in front of their webcam. The picture then appears on the screen, replicating what it looks like but in a convertible style in 3D. Truly amazing.

This has so much potential and not just for advertising but for content companies in terms of intricate story lines, on-line gaming, etc.. The biggets opportunity is to utilize old fashioned media in a way that maintain's it "sexiness" while embracing and promoting what is here and what is next. No word on what U.S. companies are embracing this technlgy but definetly something keep an eye out for in an advetising or media campaign sometime soon.

Mobile CPM's levarage in U.S. market

Mobile CPM's are starting to come down from the high of $50 to $ 60.00 to an average of $15.00. That's a big bump, what's the affect for the sudden change in elevation and downward spiral? Many people measured the 50 - 60 dollar avg. into their financial projections, so that will come as a shock as mobile spreads thinner in terms of video. While the projections may be less than expected and favoured, it still offers many, many opportunities. Those opportunities exist in WalMart looking to sell the iPhone, thousands of homes & customers cancelling their home internet and cable TV packages, with droves of people using their mobile device as their key avenue to the internet. Mobile is here and will grow an dengage the user in more ways than people are using now, while video and other kinds of media is included in that, tangible and functional applications like grocery shopping lists, Point of Purchase, and too many to list. While the CPM drops for mobile ROI, the need for robust and targeted mobile apps and content, much of it delivered through advertising, grows at a fevered pace as companies try to provide the services, technolgy companies try to create grounbreaking apps, and content cerators try to engage an uaindece on the move. This all points to positive and sutainable growth over the next 6 months, and which might even surpass expectations and revenue projections again.

Can lack of development be good news for digital spend.

As the economy falters many people forget that all around people are trying to cut costs, and now we can include and add to that list the fall TV development schedule. Who knows what the real reason is and will it be the smart one, but as studios are looking to cut money due to a advertising slowdown most development schedules have been scaled by close to 30%. This presents two opportunities, one for original content for on-line, and two, for TV studios to rethink their strategy of the past few decades. The second one could be by revisiting a stripped down development schedule that is focused on and still develops and purchases original scripted & unscripted projects for TV, but rethinks how they promote those series. One way could be to produce short-form cost-effective programming content, embracing the on-line production model, and deliver in shorter pieces like interstitial and through various on-line portals. With this model advertising dollars could be spent on-line increasing revenue for some sites, most likely deals would be put in place with Hulu, YouTube, etc... to make sure that their shows are seen through their portals. If done properly it could save millions of dollars, although the prospect of job losses suck, but it is a model that should be tinkered with to see the merit of it, with themuch thought put into possible job losses.

Change is defenitely a coming...