Frontiering Talk

With the death this week of Kerry Packer, it is perhaps a good time to reflect on media changes this century.

The Packer empire was established by Kerry’s father, Sir Frank Packer in 1933 with the Women’s Weekly Magazine. The magazine was hugely successful and it allowed Sir Frank to expand his business beginning with newspapers like Sydney’s Daily Telegraph.

Kerry, took over the empire in 1974 and took the empire into television and more recently gaming. Whilst newspapers remain a major investment of the packer empire, Kerry embraced television and now retains a strong presense. His company PBL, owns Australia’s largest television network, Channel Nine. In 1977, Kerry established World Series Cricket which changed the game and gave the fans the now popular one day version of the game. PBL also has major casino investments with Melbourne’s Crown Casino, Burswood in Perth, and a joint venture in Asia.

So with James (Kerry’s Son) set to take over the Packer empire, many commentators are asking the question, what next for the packer empire?

I suspect new media will be where James will make his mark. Already, Australia’s most popular internet site is the Nine / MSN joint venture of Ninemsn, and PBL has a 25% stake in Seek. PBL is also a partner in paytv operator Foxtel. Combining these investments allows PBL to leverage emerging technologies that are influencing cricket and other sports. I believe the next 5 years, fans will be given more and more opportunities to control which camera they watch, refer to statistics, other fans commentaries (imagine online blogging commentaries), etc. This could be deployed via Paytv, or the internet and will provide new revenue streams to support expected reductions in television advertising. Introducing additional media versions of core magazine products is also possible. If you want to reach woman, why not create a women’s weekly pod cast? The Gaming side of PBL will also start to look for the internet as a media for growth, as evidenced by Betfair’s license in Tasmania.

So whatever direction PBL ends up taking, it’s difficult not to look at the Packer empire in line with how media has evolved, from Newspapers, to Television, and the emerging new media!

Here’s a great article on something I think will definately become big in 2006, that of Social Commerce.

Firefox has launched stage 2 of their open source marketing initiative to promote the firefox browser.

Called Firefox flicks, the creative brief calls for budding creative artists to ..

Create a 30-second ad, in any style (live action or animated,) that brings Firefox to life for the millions of Web users who have yet to discover Firefox and the better Web experience it delivers.

An impressive line up of judges will judge the entries, and I am sure many of the entries will be as good or better than the typical 30 second spot.

Even Disney has realised that consumers want to customise their favourite Disney character.
Now you can at Zazzle.com.

Zazzle’s Disney boutique, which can be accessed via disneyshopping.com and disneyinkshop.com, allows consumers to select a Disney character, T-shirt style and color and to add a name or phrase from an approved list.

It’s a good sign that personalisation (rather than mass produced) is here to stay!

Video on Demand is great news for Producers of TV shows if they embrace this emerging channel.

Test bed for pilot runs.
Extras .. like what you get on a DVD
Shorter versions .. perhaps 10 min web-i-sodes
Additional revenue for re-runs.

Here’s a great article on the topic.

The business models are still being determined, but I imagine many TV executives will be mapping them out over the Christmas break.

Proven again .. Word of Mouth carries the most influence!

Over 15,000 respondents answered detailed questions on the influence of various media in making a purchase and the results show more dissimilarities than similarities across demographic and ethnic groups. The issue of influence becomes even more complicated when a product category is added to the equation.

The Top 10 Influential Media

Overall Electronic Purchases
All Ages All Ages

1. Word of Mouth 1. Word of Mouth
2. TV 2. Read Article
3. Coupons 3. TV
4. Newspaper Inserts 4. Newspaper Inserts
5. Read Article 5. Magazines
6. Direct Mail 6. Internet
7. Magazines 7. In-store Promotion
8. In-store Promotion 8. Email Advertising
9. Cable TV 9. Cable TV
10. Internet Advertising 10. Newspaper

The age of respondents also impacts the influence media will have on purchase products. For example, for electronics purchases:

The Top 10 Influential Media for Electronic Purchases
18-24 Year Olds

1. Word of Mouth
2. TV
3. Magazine
4. Internet
5. Read Article
6. In-store Promotion
7. Cable TV
8. Coupons.
9 Email Advertising
10. Direct Mail

Source: BIGresearch, COLUMBUS, OH — (MARKET WIRE) — 12/20/2005

Tags: WOM

Here’s a great poetic Christmas poem from Feedster reviewing blogging tools and components!

Packaging never looked so good.

Siemens have come up with electronic packaging that will cost around 30 cents, making it quite possible to be on the supermarket shelves within the next 2 years.

Read the article here from Wired.

Shankar Gupta of Mediapost, writes this interesting article on how a blogger thwarts PriceRitePhoto ID change.

Here’s a good article on how Brands can come under attack from various organised pressure groups. In this case, Kleenex by environmentalists for what they term “unsustainable forest operations” including “wiping away ancient forest”.

I love the conclusion

These pressure groups have significantly fewer resources than the brands they are trying to influence. However, when combining their cause with the nature of the online world and (typically) a better understanding of how the Internet and search engines work, they can often gain substantial influence on direct sales and long term brand value.

Because the traditional barriers of entering the debate has been removed, brand owners need a wake up and understand how they can defend their brands effectively online or suffer the loss in brand value and sales.

Myspace has surpased 25 million unique users per month!
Heavy.com is around 10 million users in a month, and now a new social network site called Vidilife is using online videos to atract consumers. Vidilife was set up by Brad Greenspan, a 32-year-old Internet entrepreneur who helped co-found Myspace, but left prior to the Newscorp buyout.

Traffic to Vidilife, has been promising so far with 220,000 unique users in October, after launching in September, according to Internet ratings agency comScore Media Metrix. That’s a long way behind Myspace who has been around almost 2 years, but it’s a pretty good result for a site with no marketing, other than word of mouth. It does a pretty good job of providing “send to friend”, “invite friend” features. Traffic growth, like Myspace comes from people wanting to showcase their own videos with their friends, then finding other consumer generated content of interest, and then sharing interesting content with their friends.

Lord of the Rings fans will delight in this video, aptly named “Lord of the Taco“.

As the social networking marketplace hots up, the ability to link Video’s stored on Vidilife to consumers Myspace sites could mean that Vidilife becomes the specialist consumer video vault.
However, Myspace is sure to be thinking about adding it’s own video capabilities. Watch this (I mean “My”) space!

Tags: Social Network, WOM

You have a great brand, when consumers love your product so much, that they make their own commercials. Here’s a Consumer Generated Video Ad for Google Maps.

Ads are becoming more prevalent inside video media.

News Interactive (a division of Newscorp), has started putting embedded ads inside it’s daily video content. A press release on the Roo website explains,

Successful online video will provide News Interactive with additional opportunities for advertisers with 15-30 second TV-style advertising clips integrated before and after topical video clips and ads featured on main pages and with banner pop-ups.

“Advertisers are rethinking their consumer marketing strategies in the face of personalised, evolving media. Online video advertising will provide them with a new way to engage consumers” said Nic Jones.

As more and more people are using the internet to “time shift” video content, it was always going to be just a matter of time before advertising joined the fray. I think this trend will become more prominent in 2006, and new business models for selling advertising will emerge.

I don’t think it will be too long before we will see technology where different ads can be served to different people within the same video footage, based on their various profiles.