What’s next?

Ged Carroll – director | digital strategies

In this presentation

• How?• Warning• Themes• Links & stuff

How?

• Completely subjective• Watching changes• Listening to discussions

!WARNING!

The man who predicts the future lies, even when he tells the truth – The Qur’an

THEMES

Societal factors

• Muscular telecoms and media sectors– No longer all you can eat bandwidth– Failure of programmes to bridge digital divide

which would have cost telecoms companies– Failure of net neutrality– Strong IP laws affecting innovation

• End of the wild west – Societal norming around privacy ‘right to be

forgotten’ vs. freedom of speech– Increased watchdog muscle: ASA now in the

social media space from March 2011

Economic factors

• Double-dip recession– Ireland likely to go into sovereign debt default

a la Iceland– UK government cutbacks bite home

• HMG had been spending 1Bn GBP/yr on media space | advertising

– UK house price drop

• Value focused marketers– Measureable call to action– CPM– Cost per acquisition

Just media – drop the social

• Social media becomes the new normal• Expected throughout all campaigns | disciplines

– Selling an integrated approach is harder for competitors to cost and replicate

– Depositions online specialists

• Why?– Increasing talk of ‘transmedia’ and integrated

marketing: blog posts conferences etc– Marketers more comfortable with holistic mix

• Search for value

– Tools starting to become mainstream to allow an integrated dashboard

Augmented reality – use sparingly• Great creative tactic

– Interesting work done in B2C & B2B as part of an online big idea. Creative web opportunities abound

• Why?– It’s only as good as the creative: what’s the

context?– Hammers smartphone batteries– 3rd party tools: Google Sketch-Up– Consumer interest in breaking the 4th wall – 3D etc– Needs a clear call to action for measuring impact

Community management

• You’ve got some Facebook followers, what next?

• Organisations needing help with monitoring, providing community tasks & transition strategies

• Why?–Move from campaigns to conversations– Risk of dis-engaged audiences–Need to capitalise on experiments

Flight to quality content• Brands become media companies• Content strategy, creation and syndication • Why?

– Media titles are still struggling to work out their relevance– Consumers will catch on to content farm tactics used by reputation

management firms– Brands & agencies are staffing up with editorial teams

• Kaspersky in the US• Industry including Ruder Finn and Edelman - media veterans content focus

– Still good for organic search– Google Instant makes organic and universal search position even more

important– Hungry channels need to be filled

• Text• Video • Images

– Easy cross-platform syndication– Platform proliferation: e-book readers, tablets, PCs

Location – creative opportunities• Where the innovation heat was in 2010• Have your clients thought about location yet?

– Strategy | ATL | BTL – content creation

• Why?– Google Maps – valuable reference tool

• Geotag images to help highlight clients brands at sites

– Mobile • Mostly used by retail & food services, but could be used for

– Competitive de-positioning– Talent acquisition– B2B brand discovery

• Even NASA is on board with Foursquare

– Will Facebook ‘kill’ the sector?• It’ll try very hard

Mobile: iPhone… for the time being

• Mobile is coming… finally likely• Why?

– iPhone wins out at moment due to device | platform fragmentation of Android ecosystem & RIM in transition

– iPhone tariffs tend to be better for data– Move away from all-you-can-eat data tariffs – App Store – global reach– User context: personal, immediate– Wildcards

• Everyone in the sector suing everyone else over intellectual property rights

• Nokia: Platforms? Getting its developer and market mojo back?

Social CRM

• Customers dictating channels to customers

• Issues management before it becomes an issue

• Why?– Easiest to measure | prove ROI of social media– Need imposed on client by customer– Organisations run risk of being overwhelmed

as can’t scale, need steering on tools and processes

Facebook

• Becomes less useful as a below-the-line tool • Opportunity in targeted ATL purchases for client

campaigns– Highly measurable– Clear CTA

• Why?– Facebook has captured 25% US display advertising by

ratcheting ToS– 0.2% chance on average of your news appearing in

audiences feed– Community pages– Users tend to engage with up to 5 brands on Facebook

Q&A opportunity… maybe

• Potential opportunity for the provision of expert comment• Helping B2B clients engage with potential prospects and

demonstrate expertise | thought leadership• Why?

– Less regulated than consumer space– Focused content creation– Good for search – Increasing social features in LinkedIn will make Q&A facility more

important– New interest in sector with Quora attracting high quality answers

from digital community • Less noisy than LinkedIn• Easier to seed questions

– Not a new idea, hasn’t seen break out success in the west so far, but B2B has a potential for better quality, more focused answers

Twitter

• Evolving design and business model offers opportunities

• New design requires new backgrounds, evolving promoted tweets | advertising model requires media planning and feeds require content

• Why?– Change in management shows maturity– High brand engagement – Highly measureable – Facebook’s increasing dominance in display

advertising requires a counterweight in media plans

LINKS & STUFF

Services to watch (if you haven’t already)

• Questions– Quora– Formspring – easy

way to create an FAQ

– Hunch – decision engine

• Location– Foursquare– Facebook Places– Gowalla

• Augmented reality– Google SketchUp

• Research | monitoring– Google Realtime

Thank you for listeninghttp://ruderfinn.co.uk | @r_c