ZA News bypasses traditional media

I’ve been involved in putting the ZA News media launch together (via client kulula.com) over the last couple of weeks. Yesterday morning at the Grand Daddy in Cape Town we held the very first screening in front of around forty journalists and the show seems to have gone down pretty well. The launch was a bit of a PR challenge as we had several things against us. Firstly nobody from the SABC was going to be brave enough to turn up so that takes off a lot of TV and radio targets. Also the show is being hosted on Mail & Guardian Online which is a competitor to both traditional print and online publishers. It’s credit to Zapiro and team that the concept was strong enough to still attract competitors to the launch (and also says something positive about SA media).

Choosing the online route (even if it wasn’t first choice) takes the show into really interesting territory and makes it pretty unique. The show will go out between Tuesday and Saturday every week so it requires the kind of production team traditionally only TV could put together. I think the show is going to hopefully be seen as the tipping point where this type of content is viable online (thanks to sponsors) and can bypass traditional media (with all the political restraints that go along with it).

New campaign for Capitec Bank

Atmosphere has just launched The Capitec Bank Youth Prosperity Survey. Aimed at connecting with young people and their parents, the survey takes a look at young adults attitudes and aspirations in relation to wealth.

To support the campaign we collaborated with Cow Africa to create a microsite to host the survey’s findings and includes a (beautifully designed) interactive quiz on spending habits and vox pops. In its first day the campaign has already scored a primetime interview on E TV, frontpage coverage in the Pretoria News and articles in Weekend Argus, Daily Dispatch, Weekend Witness, Beeld and Die Burger with much more expected over the next few days.

Creative PR case study: The Beautiful Game

I came across The Beautiful Game while looking for creative pr case studies. Put together by UK agency 3W the campaign was designed to relaunch The Football Pools (an 85 year old way of betting on the results of British football). The client also wanted to draw attention to the money they give the arts through the campaign. The answer was to work with the Royal Ballet to create a performance based on the best ever soccer moments (as voted for by 10000 fans). This was premiered to media in London and publically performed in Liverpool drawing masses of coverage in the mainstream press and eventually a Cannes Gold Lion for PR. This worked because it was unexpected enough to inspire media to cover it but the execution was also perfectly aligned with the message the client wanted to put out there. Check the video out for more.

Is 1 Twitterer worth 125 Facebookers?

Interesting observation while checking out analytics for one of the social media campaigns we’re running at Atmosphere: the brands facebook fan page has 20,000 members (its been running  a while) the still new twitter group has about 160. Yet the traffic coming to our microsite is roughly equal from the two places despite very similar content being posted. My shoddy maths makes 1 twitterer worth 125 facebookers for this brand. My take on it is this:

• Facebook is pretty mainstream in SA now vs Twitter which has been adopted largely by those interested in social media so Twits are more curious and active vs Facebookers which are passive (at least with brands)
• The shortness and lack of visuals on Twitter mean to consume the content we put up you have to click through vs Facebook where its much easier to digest our content in one place
• Maybe the limitations of Twitter mean we’ve worked harder to tease the content in short succing bites than our posts on Facebook where we can say as much as we like

We Live In Public trailer

We Live In Public is a new documentry on Josh Harris. The guy pretty much invented the Big Brother concept (on the web) placing videos all around his flat to follow his life and inviting people to come and live in a debauched bunker covered in web cams. All this in the pre-broadband era. Predictably it ended in tears.

Marketing to a 3.5 second attention span

My generation (gen x) supposedly has an attention span of 3.5 minutes (the average length of an MTV pop video). The web has reduced this to about 3.5 seconds I reckon (about the length of time to read and digest a twitter post). Marketing to the internet generation requires new methods (sticking a 30 second spot on a flash video is not going to be the answer obviously).

I did a talk to the IABC last night on online pr which covered some of this (in brief these were my suggestions):

• Content needs to have immediate and easy appeal or at least offer enough of a tease to suck people into a longer engagement (the Best Job In The World campaign is a great example timed to break just as the northern hemisphere goes back to work in the middle of winter the offer of escaping to be caretaker of a tropical island has immediate appeal that’s easy and relevant to consume).
• Communications should be in short snacks of information and aim to draw people into a longterm relationships/communications – the marketing industry is built around intensive campaigns that are often short-burst this may need to change to be really effective
• We need to consider where our message is being consumed (at home, at work while avoiding doing tasks or increasingly on the move)
• Consumers are now talking back (via Twitter for example) assuming your marketing plan is to have a conversation with them its going to have to be a longterm commitment (its going to look weird when you suddenly shut up once “the campaign” is over)
• We need to understand the currency that works with web consumers they expect to be paid for their attention with something of value: free stuff, genuine entertainment, an ego massage/traffic to their web stuff
• Despite web 2.0 asking consumers to generate content for a brand is a big ask and requires a suitable incentive (most user generated content campaigns seem to struggle)
• I’ve posted on this already this week but the tone needs to be conversational and not ad copy (no one wants to talk to an ad)
• As more and more people are competing for attention there is a rapid arms race of ideas happening to cut through the clutter things often need to be unexpected and random (hence marketing getting more and more surreal/wacky)
• Ideas need to be micro targeted – the idea of hitting everyone with a massively viewed viral piece is pretty unrealistic these days – many consumers are buried in online communities around specific interest groups. Maybe its better to target smaller groups and use language and content appropriate to them (e.g. target bands and their followers or communities of mothers)

Social media is for wrinklies

So Twitter is full of thirty somethings and Facebook is being rapidly adopted by the over fifties according to some recent articles. This makes sense i’ve been hearing lots of stories of parents making friends with their offspring  – not least as its the only way they can find out what they’re up to.

The Guardian (UK) pulls out a bunch of stats on Twitter adoption which i think is likely to play out in South Africa too:

• In April, web metrics firm comScore reported that the majority of Twitter’s 10m or so users were over 35.
• In June, comScore reported that 11.3% of visitors to Twitter.com in the U.S. are ages 12-17. Internationally, only 4.4% of visitors were younger then 18, according to comScore data from May.
• In June, Pace University said that while 99% of 18-24 year olds have profiles on social networks, only 22% use Twitter.

David Lynch’s interview project

Interview Project is a 20,000 mile road trip around the states filming interviews of people along the way. All of the interviews are unplanned and are of people the crew come across on the road. You can follow Interview project on David Lynch’s website and via twitter.

Steri Stumpie marching band performance

That said our (collaboration between King James RSVP, Mnemonic and Atmosphere) Steri Stumpie campaign totally rocks. This was filmed in the office on Friday when the Steri band had its first performance. We’ve hired these guys as a reward for the brands Official Unofficial brand ambassadors. We’ll be doing one of these a month. Tons of fun.

Old media strikes back (a demographic study of one)

I have noticed phrases like “online is the way everything is going” a few times over the last week, both from advertising types and publishers. I had plenty of opportunity with the latter at the web 2.0 conference in Cape Town last week. Every time it’s said with a bit of gloom and wistfulness for the old days of television ads and/or the rustle of broadsheets on a Sunday Morning.

I feel sorry for these people because they obviously love the work they do and they feel the weight of doom and kids with iphones bearing down upon them. A good point in this weeks Digital Edge podcast was that media doesn’t work like that if you look at history. Cinema wasn’t killed by TV or internet piracy (in fact its pretty healthy),  There is far more broadcast footage being shot these days than ever before (its just going online more). And radio (if you broaden it to include podcasts) is actually thriving.

Based on my demographic study of one, radio consumption has actually shot up dramatically over the last year. It could be the rapid approach of middle age youth of course but actually think not. Audio is relatively cheap to produce so its quite easy to build shows around specialist areas of content (that old Long Tail thing). So rather listen to crap on 5FM during the day in the car I listen to downloaded shows. And if I have stuff to do round the house I often plug my ipod into the stereo to accompany it. It’s a great medium for multi-taskers (which is the main occupation of the noughties it seems).

My regular weekly consumption is something like this now:

Sunday:

• Download the (excellent) new Monocle Weekly podcast and listen to it lazing on the stoep (with coffee)
• Also use the BBC iplayer to listen to Radio 4 or Radio 6 while I read the paper

Monday:

• Download the Digital Edge podcast (listen to it while making food some point during the week)

Tuesday/Wednesday:

• Get the latest two episodes of Beats In Space via itunes (Tim Sweeney’s excellent space disco show on a New York college radio) I listen to this mostly while driving around.
• Also get the Media Guardian’s (UK) Tech Weekly podcast which again listen to while making food or doing the chores required to keep my crumbling Victorian bungalow from returning to the dust.

Thursday/Friday/Saturday:

• As most of the podcasts I follow come out earlier in the week if i need new stuff by this point i’ll pay a visit to Myspace and let a page stream tracks (DFA for example), Download Digital Planet from the BBC, or listen to Tiga (if a new episode is available) or Modcast.

And just to show its not only me living in this brave new world i’ve checked with my mum and she downloads The Archers (long running radio soap opera) to listen to while she does the ironing regularly.

So my advice to those weeping into their pillows about dying media is cheer up and transfer your skills (the new world ain’t that different).