Next Wave Marketing

Reality Shows

2008-11-05T01:17:00.000-08:00

I am so into Leona Lewis for the past few days. I have been checking all the videos and news about her that I can get my hands on. Isn't she simply awesome? OK, for those who still don't know who is Leona Lewis, you might have heard the song "Bleeding Love". Yep, Leona is the singer.

I am a big fan of good music, I am particularly moved by great voices. I play during my leisure in orchestras and I listen to rock music when I am driving. It is part of life for me when it comes to music. A few pop artists/groups whom I really like are: avril, elvis, beetles, carpenters, kurt, and coldplay.

This blog is to discuss about groundswell effect, does my interest have much to do with it? Well, please read on.

Leona Lewis was discovered through reality talent show "X Factor" which featured none other than the famous Simon Cowell. Simon is famous for the Idol shows which produced singer like Kelly Clarkson. The groundswell effect is obvious as the shows feature talent from ordinary people who take part and the results come from the votes from the public.

OK, it is pretty clear on the two points mentioned as well. However, did you notice that, Simon brought Leona to sing in American Idol? Isn't this interesting? You have global movie companies or music labels which have their bases everywhere to market their products. Well, Simon and his teams have figured a way to capitalize on reality shows as well. Apart from having valuable publicity performing at various platforms, these artists are exposing themselves in different continents!

This is a product by the ingenuity of Simon and his teams to link these reality shows franchises together! Don't we have that already? Yes, in Asia, many countries have their own talent competitions, which the winners would qualify for the FINAL in some country somewhere. However, these talent competitions were not linked in the first place, people just link the same functions together, and sell it again by staging a super-Finale!

Well, it is not a new product back in US. Aren't we so familiar with Ms.Teen, Ms.USA and on a global basis, Ms.Universe, etc? These are groundswell. It starts from the grassroots and popularity is accumulated along the way. By-products are created along the value chain and eventually you get a complete business model being set up.

Yep, you are right, aren't Olympic and World Cup happening in the same way? There are just so many instances of groundswell. I am just looking at Simon's reality shows business today. Support Leona Lewis!

Groundswell - an Introduction

2008-10-12T17:51:00.000-07:00

I am reading a book published by Forrester Research on the effect of Groundswell.

Groundswell in the internet age refers to the use of technologies to influence public behaviour and to foster opinion. The most popular groundswell technologies include: Blog, Wiki, Social Networks (MySpace, Facebook, Friendster), BBS, Forum, and Chat program (Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger, AOL, etc).

The book provided many case studies of groundswell effect. A few notable examples include how General Motor (GM) started a blog to market its new products, how the blue-ray disc encryption code was revealed via blog, how Firefox gained a steady growth and captured 25% of market share, how Linux is an open source product which relies on groundswell to determine how it will function.

I will elaborate more on this in my next blog.

Chinese Music in Advertisement

2008-10-06T19:19:00.000-07:00

Ever wondered why is there a distinct knowledge when traditional chinese music is applied to advertisement? You might think that this is because the musical instrument used? You might think that those tunes are wellknown chinese tunes?

Music has always been used as a medium of marketing. Pepsi Co. has a group of artists singing their theme song every year, some of these songs even make it to the charts and became hits in billboards.

What is distinctively chinese comes from the unique composing technique that utilizes only 5 of the vocals instead of the 7 we are so familiar with. Typical traditional chinese song composing technique uses Do, Re, Mi, So, La only. Fa and Ti are excluded in most compositions. Chinese think that Fa and Ti are not full tone vocals and this might have shaped the chinese flavour that we know today.

For musician readers, you might have a question whether Chinese only know about Do, Re, Mi, So, La? The answer is NO. Chinese is perhaps the first who discovered the full 7 vocal tones with the escavation of an ancient chinese musical instrument named: Pian Chong. It is a gigantic musical percussion instrument which can be considered as the first complete tone intrument. In fact, the first chinese musical artifact was dated 7000 year old. It is an egg-like wind instrument made of clay.

Remember Tan Dun who created the theme song of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon? You might be interested to revisit the song again to differentiate the tones. Cheers.

Click Click Click

2008-10-02T00:30:00.000-07:00

Advertisement is using all the means to have an idea delivered across to a wide public community. Effective advertisement usually means the idea reaches the right community causing the right impact based on the original marketing objectives. In many other cases, advertisement is about "letting everyone know"

In the mobile advertising business, the most common way is to have advertisement appearing in electronic devices. However, there are many ways which can accomplish and complement this, such as:

1. Cost Per Click
2. Cost Per Impression (CPM for 1k impression)
3. Cost Per registration
4. Cost Per lead

In short, the advertisement banner, words, links would encourage people to know about certain brands, provide convenient ways for people to register through the advertisement, attract people to click on the advertisement which might lead to new website, or just merely, by bombarding user devices daily to cast a lasting impression.

The internet advertising technologies such as AdWords, AdSense would enable some checking to ensure there is accurate statistics of the advertisement. Counts do not count for: reload of webpage, access to webpage via multiple internet communicators from the same IPs, etc.

We have seen that email newsletter during the advent of Internet age 10 years ago has very much transcend (or some may have evolved) into SPAM mails. People are using less time to check these advertisement nowadays due to the high amount of SPAM. This is when "PULL" advertisement comes about. SPAM is considered "PUSH", most of the time unsolicited traffic delivered to our accounts or devices. However, "PULL" is totally the contrary concept. Users are usually required to register to receive these mails or advertisement. I reckon that this may seem like a good model at this moment, but whether it will evolve into mobile SPAM advertisement in the future, we are yet to know. Let's see how long will people be content with the existing mobile advertising ideas before a stable ecosystem is formed.

Next Wave Marketing?

2008-10-01T02:08:00.001-07:00

The mobile ad markets are ballooning?

Frost & Sullivan has forcasted in their Sept 2008 report that, Mobile Ad revenue would rise to S1.9 billion in US in 2008. According to its research, 85% of US population subscribes to mobile services. That translates to about 250 million mobile phone users. Gartner has forcasted earlier this year that, the Mobile Ad revenue should rocket to $11.8 billion worldwide in 3 years time (2011).

A study on these figures shows the potential of this emerging market. AdMob is still the leader in the mobile ad arena, but with heavyweight player joining the game, could AdMob hold on to its lead for long? One of these aggressive expansions is done by BuzzCity Pte. Ltd., little known company in the US, but has long and firm grip in the developing countries since 1999. Google, Nokia, and Yahoo are starting their campaign in the mobile world as well, especially after the introduction of the popular iPhone. However, US might be the big money spender in advertisement, we should focus in emerging potential markets which are having phenomenal growth in the mobile advertising world. One of them to keep an eye on is - Indonesia

80 million Indonesian, or 34% of the population has subscription to mobile phone services. The average per customer at Telkom cellphone unit is recorded at $8.40 for the first 6 months of 2007, with data services contributing 38% of its revenue. Telkom is the second largest South-East Asia mobile phone service provider. The plan to increase data, internet and multimedia services is timely as according to Indonesian Internet Service Provider Association statistics, the number of Indonesian to have access to internet services would rise 73% to 43 million users by year 2009. Indonesia has a population of 234 million people, and is deemed as the 3rd largest democratic country after US and India. With Hutchinson CP Telecommunications, a unit of Hong Kong Tycoon Li, Ka-Shing joining the Indonesia mobile services scene in mid 2007, we are forecasting that the rate of subscription would dive even further, making way for creative or flat data plans which will encourage further influx in this country mobile industry.

With the accelerating rate of mobile service adoption in developing countries, we will expect the influence of mobile networks to increase in the field of advertising and branding. Some brands would just want to have their footages in these communities instead of having high traffic to click on their advertisement. Nike, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Kraft, etc, all these household names would want to reach out to the households of these markets to expand their branding activities. We might be seeing the next wave of marketing taking shape within the short period of 3 years from now. I will take a more detail study into these markets in future entries, expect to see more articles on the study of US, India and Indonesia markets.

iAgent - a blueprint which transformed the internet

2008-09-30T21:21:00.000-07:00

iAgent - an initial study
Ever wonder how is information gathered and retrieved in the internet? When you typed http://depzzy.blogspot.com, ever wonder how the blog is retrieved? This is an introduction of one of the earliest commercialized information processing system - iAgent. (early days? Think of altavista.com, excite.com and the first inception of yahoo.com!)

iAgent was developed by researchers in Kent Ridge Digital Labs. One of them being Dr.Kok F. Lai, who is the co-founder of BuzzCity Pte. Ltd. The first version of the system was introduced in 1997 and was later adopted by AltaVista, a premier search engine at the advent of the popularization of the Internet. This write-up is based on the original engine in 1997.

It is a system developed for information collection and retrieval, especially in for multilingual and networks environments. This original blueprint has been expended to accomodate for major languages in the world, including Korean, Tamil, Chinese, Malay. Bahasa Indonesia, Thai, English, etc.

There are 3 important parts of this engine, namely: Information Gathering, Freetext Engine (Indexing, Retrieval), WWW interface.

Information Gathering:
iAgent works with well-known protocols. These include HTTP, NNTP, POP, FTP. These protocols would allow the agent to collect the information widely available on the internet. HTTP works with DNS names to retrieve valid content, NNTP retrieves information from newss servers, POP enable connectivity of email systems and FTP for transfer of messages among network nodes.

Freetext Engine:
After the information gathering, the Freetext Engineer will create inverted freetext index to enable document retrieval in the future. Treat this as a library indexing machine. We have many type of material in the library, such as: audio & visual products, books, documents, graphical material, computers, etc. The freetext engineer puts a label on these items and enables them to be identified quickily.

The retrieval process can support different query strings, such as: keywords or Boolean operations (AND, OR, NOT). These would present the document in a clustering format and it would also show the document extract. These clustering and document extract are the most common database retrieval results in nowadays. This enables people to form initial opionion about the document they want to retrieve.

WWW Interface:
This is a common protocol used to interface with browsers, such as Microsoft's Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, etc. The results retrieved from the retrieval process would be presented in HTML format. The document would be retrieved via URL of the document after users have selected it.

Study Notes:
We may take this simple engine for granted nowadays but back in 1997, it was a great invention and helped shaped the internet technologies as we know today. This engine provides a blueprint for information collection and retrieval system development since then, especially those that emphasize much on multilingual characters. A later development has seen paterns and graphical recognition being integrated. This would be studied in next article.

Please find more information about iAgent from here Technical Paper

Mobile Internet Publishers' Havens?

2008-09-30T06:52:00.000-07:00

BuzzCity
- Championing the developing countries, such as: Indonesia, Philipinnes, South Africa, Ghana, Kenya, Middle East, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, India - Low rate at $0.01 at any country, even including banner advertisement - Minimum spending at $20 only!

AdMob
- Expensive rate relative to conversion rates in developing countries - Main traffic is in United States, tailing BuzzCity in other developing countries - Higher payout! (According to AdMob forum users)

Yahoo & Nokia

- Just for premium brands that can afford high CPM

Google

- New (and "still" small) player on the mobile block

ZestAdz, Mobango, Mkhoj, Mojiva, Agamata

- New (and small) players on the mobile block

Admoda

- most expensive entry point at $500
- Need to pay transaction cost yourself!

DeskTrade

- minimum bid of $0.05 at any country, simply one of the most expensive!
- only for publishers who are confident of sustaining high CPA cost

QuickTips:

1. Use BuzzCity if you want to spend little and earn considerably enough. The King of networks in developing countries.

2. Use AdMob if you want to earn a lot and the majority of users you want are in US.

3. Use BOTH, if you want the best of both worlds!

MPhil Draft - Next Wave Marketing

2008-09-30T02:59:00.000-07:00

A Description of the Research Problem:

This research project explores the extent to which mobile advertising has grown since 2000, especially in developing countries, where the ratio of mobile phone ownership is usually higher than personal computer ownership. According to Frost & Sullivan research, the ratio of Mobile Phone vs PC is standing at 40% to 10% in most developing countries. Gartner further forecasts that mobile advertising investment would increase to $11.8 billion by 2011 from a mere $ 2.7 billion in 2008.

In view of this, this research focuses in particular on these areas:
1. Potential Market of Mobile Advertising
2. Major Companies in this field (BuzzCity, AdMob, MadHouse, etc.)
3. Major Technologies comparison among the companies
4. Marketing Return of Investment (ROI) for Mobile Advertising
5. Marketing Methodologies (Charge Per Click, Charge Per Impression, etc.)
6. Marketing Targets & Preference (Geographically Distributed, Culturally Distributed, Monetarily Distributed)
7. Influence of Mobile Social Networking technologies (MyGamma, Facebook Mobile, MySpace Mobile, etc)

Why The Research is Important:

1. To forecast the business model for Mobile Advertising
2. To help businesses decide the potential ROI Mobile Advertising
3. To probe on the differences of Mobile technologies vs. Internet technologies and what are the influences

Empirical Research Methodology:

A few methodologies would be deployed for this research, such as the conventional sampling, and data collection & analysis. I hope to engage major companies (such as: BuzzCity) to understand what onine engine that they deploy to gather their research data they published in the early 2008. I hope to work with these companies to formulate some data collection engines to be deployed through their existing mobile networks.

* Complete research proposal would be supplied upon request.

Funding Request:

I hope to complete this research as part of my MPhil Research and hope that interested party can contact me to supply funding. I can work closely with sponsors to formulate my research towards the industrial use for your company.

Estimation of Expenses:

University incurred Research Fees: US$4k per annum
Travelling: US$1k per annum
Material Course: US$1k per annum
Research Expenses: US$1k per annum

Total: $7k per annum

* Complete financial estimation breakdown would be supplied upon request.

Contact:

depzzy@hotmail.com

* Complete resume would be supplied upon request