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This is the personal blog of John F. Morton. It's where I talk about the stuff that interests me. Primarily technology, marketing and pop culture. If you are looking for my portfolio of work, visit johnfmorton.com. Thanks for stopping by!

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CES: Rethinking Advertising, New Video Platforms, New Video Paradigms

On Tuesday, I went to Rethinking Advertising: Broadband, VOD, DVR and Mobile - New Video Platforms, New Video Paradigms. One speaker didn’t attend, Will Griffin. Overall, I didn’t think that this session stayed on the topic that it was supposed to. That doesn’t mean some interesting discussion didn’t happen, but it was an unintentional bait and switch. (That’s what we ad people get accused of sometimes, right?) Here are some of my notes from the session.

Jeff Shultz, of concert.tv, talked about his business. Concert.tv is a video on demand channel. The channel has live concert films served to users on demand. It runs on cable TV systems and is supported by advertising. Initially, Coke was their only sponsor. A year later, there were 12 advertisers. There was some discussion about whether or not local ads run on his service. My impression is that they don’t. When his channel started, there was no existing business model that a cable company expected, so they made their deal that way.

Advertising delivered through a VOD channel is highly trackable. You know exactly how many times your ad was played, and, if the cable company wanted to, you could get some very detailed information. It sounds like cable companies are not very likely to hand over that information, especially if they are not able to sell local ad inventory on the channel.

Having ads delivered through a VOD service lead to a discussion of the validity of the 30 second ad. Mr. Shultz said that Selling ads in 30 second increments is a flawed system. 30 seconds is not necessarily more likely to reach your consumer than a 15 second ad, an 8 second ad, or 2 minute ad. Being able to deliver relevant ad messages is more important than time eyes are watching your ad.

That’s one reason the future of mobile advertising is so interesting. We can pinpoint a location of a person using GPS and serve them ads relevant to their location.

A person from the audience asked the panel why it seemed that every new marketing effort (specifically, mobile) seemed to be targeted at 18-24 year old men. The panel basically said that those were the people who adopted the technology first and they then serve as the test market for exploring new ways to reach people with new technology.

Lori Schwartz, of the IPG Emerging Media Labs, said that in a VOD world, clients are demanding high levels of data on its effectiveness. They are expecting both the traditional Nielsen type viewership data plus the type of data that running ads in broadband delivers.

There was also discussion of being able to track eyeballs across media channels. An example of a company that is doing this already is Ripe TV. Visit their site here.

There's more to read. Click here for the rest. >>

The Latest Object of Desire: iPhone.

I have until June to figure out how I get out of my Verizon Wireless contract. That’s 5 months to plan. In case you’re one of the 54 people who didn’t already know about the iPhone, visit the Apple site.

I’ve been at CES all week long where all kinds of amazing technology has been introduced. The only so called “news alert” I received from ABCNews.com about anything technology related was for the iPhone. I noticed people surfing for photos of the iPhone from their own now-ready-to-be-replaced mobile devices during one of the sessions I was attending.

CES: Copy(right) Fights

The second knowledge track session I attended was Copy Fights: Consumers and Hollywood, Are They Compatible? Here are some of my notes. As before, I’m sure some of my own bias will creep into them.

Copyright and Fair Use as we know it is actually facing more issues outside the US than inside.

There are proposed laws that would add another layers of rights on top of the already complicated mix of rights that need to be addressed when creating content. This new law, if I understood it correctly, would let the people who transmit a signal have a level of transmission rights. Sarah Deutsch, from Verizon brought this up several times as something they were lobbying against happening.

The media industry has learned some lessons from the Napster and Grockster cases, which they won, but didn’t actually better their positions by winning in the way they did. The recording industry suing their customers didn’t engender positive press and the peer-to-peer activity has only increased in magnitude. The industry has approached YouTube from a much different perspective. YouTube hasn’t been “sued out of existence” like Napster and Grockster. Why? First of all, up until recently, YouTube didn’t have any real assets to sue for. They were an unprofitable company with no clear business model. (Google was at one time in the same exact situation though, and they figured out a business model.) Also, YouTube was trying to work with the industry to enforce their copyrights. They immediately pull down content that they are told violate copyright law. They’ve also been trying to sign agreements that will give blanket rights to protect them. Universal has signed such a deal with YouTube.

YouTube has also promised to introduce a filter on uploaded content that will preemptively identify content that breaks the law. The panel pretty much uniformly thought this was probably not going to work and that after it has proven a failure, the whole situation could change again.

Near the end of the session, one of the panelist said that this is both an exciting time for the consumer and a very frustrating one as well. 

There's more to read. Click here for the rest. >>

CES: User Generated Media session

The first “knowledge session” I attended at CES 2007 was User Generated Media: An Internet, Communications and Advertising Transformation. It was really informative. My notes from the session aren’t complete but I’ll try to reconstruct as much of them as I can here. Some of my own thoughts have slipped in.

User-generated content is providing the voyeuristic view that traditional producers of media wouldn’t approach. Consumer generated media isn’t new though. Remember Rodney King? That event basically was the video tape beating. That user-generated video generated the story back on March 3, 1991. Skip forward to today and the power of user-generated content is shown again in the Saddam execution video. The “official” video—molded and edited to serve an authority’s purpose—was quickly supplanted by the grainy camera phone video that exposed the taunts and chaos of the situation. That camera phone video is now the version people know of that event.

We’re also seeing the emergence of very high-quality video pieces now that the technology that used to be only in the hands of “professionals” has become affordable to the masses. One example shown of non-professional content produced by a student on his/her computer was Dollface. You can see it here below.

Given the power of user-generated content and the production values it is now capable of, we need to ask ourselves the question, how does this change the rules for media and advertising producers? Advertisers need to follow their potential consumers wherever they happen to go. Where are they going with their eyeballs consuming content? They go all over the place. The problem with so much content in so many different situations is that there has got to be some guarantee that the client who is buying advertising associated with that user-generated content is represented correctly.

When a new technology comes along, it seems “spectacle” is the first forms of expression that happen there. “Storytelling” comes later. Initial attempt in film were just spectacle pieces, showing off what could be done with the technology. The storytelling came later. We will probably see user-generated content go in that direction too.

When we ask for users to generate content for a brand, we are going to get the people who are highly motivated by that brand to respond and it will be really informative to see their perspective. People want to tell their story. They sometimes want to express themselves using the world they live in which is filled by lots of copyrighted material. There needs to be more effort trying to rectify this problem. We’re asking people to live with our brands and they’re taking us up on that request and they are going to use them to express themselves when they create content about their lives.

There's more to read. Click here for the rest. >>

CES Opening Day Keynote

Today at CES I attended the opening keynote address. It was given by Gary Shapiro, President and CEO, Consumer Electronics Association and Ed Zander, Chairman of the Board and CEO, Motorola Inc. Mr. Shapiro’s address was fine. Honestly, he’s not got great stage presence, but he did talk about Digital Freedom Campaign which “is dedicated to defending the rights of artists, innovators, creators and consumers to use lawful technology free of unreasonable government restrictions and without fear of costly lawsuits.” Check out their site at digitalfreedom.org.

Mr. Zander’s keynote started as he rode a bike onto the stage that charged a mobile phone that sat in a charger attached to the handlebars. I’m not sure if it’s currently in production, but he said it can charge mobile phones that are used in developing countries where having access to an electrical outlet isn’t always easy. He also talked about some new Motorola phones and a partnership with Yahoo. You can check out the Yahoo service3 at go.yahoo.com. If you’re interested, you can see the keynote here.