Bought, Owned and/or Earned

Over the past couple months I’ve been attending conferences: The IAB Annual Meeting, PMA Annual Integrated Marketing Conference, DIGIDAY: SOCIAL, and iMedia’s Breakthrough Summit. I’ve been a listener, presenter, and occasional inquisitor.

My goal is to get the word of Campfire’s methodology out there, but also to assess industry practice during a period of major flux. So this week I’m going to ad:tech in San Francisco, followed by a 4A’s event, and a brief stop at iMedia’s Driving Interactive.

Already I‘ve seen one question raised repeatedly: the proper use of media in “new” marketing campaigns. In a way this is the old issue of separation of media planning and buying from creative, but now with a different spin.

Get this: I’m at the famous one-minute dating event at the iMedia Breakthrough in Fort Meyers. We, client and agency participants, are sitting at a long, long U-shaped table, and for one minute, “providers” pitch us on their services and then move down the line. Most of these providers are ad networks.

I don’t know what to say to them. Although Campfire works with some networks (Federated for instance), we largely rely on “Earned Media”. We tell people stories, they adopt and adapt them, and tell new versions to their friends. (Hence the name Campfire.)

At another session I sat through a couple of presentations about video distribution from two companies: BBE and DBG. These presentations, involving the syndication of branded video to millions of on-line viewers, are as impressive as hell — but don’t include any “social media”, i.e., the structure in not about retelling; it’s “Bought Media”.

Finally at the IAB, portals like MSN and Yahoo showed off marketing programs relying on their own platforms and a captive, or captivated, audience. “Owned Media.”

Where do these channel tactics intersect? Who’s exploiting a balance of Bought, Owned and Earned? See “Why your marketing program will never really be integrated” By Lori Luechtefeld and Earned Media May Be Efficient, but It’s Far From Free by Pete Blackshaw.

Randall Rothenberg, CEO and chief agitator at the IAB, and I have proposed that we focus on this issue via the IAB’s Agency Advisory Committee, which includes Campfire, Crispin, Droga5, AKQA, Ogilvy, Barbarian, and a group of media agencies. This should lead to a fascinating session, as each of us approaches media based on agency’s origins and staffing.

Meanwhile, think about this: does your company rely on just one leg of the Bought, Owned and Earned stool? And wouldn’t it be great if we found the right magic combination of these different approaches? And by what standard would we judge the best combo? ROI? The silver bullet of an engagement metric? Sales?

I’ll be at ad:tech and the 4A’s through Monday, April 27, drop me a line at swax@campfirenyc.com or @campfiresteve if you want to talk.

Technorati Tags: Campfire, Earned Media, Media, Owned Media

Instant Communications and the Meltdown

David Brooks, writing in the New York Times about the financial meltdown yesterday, put forth two possible theories as to how bankers got it so wrong: “either Greed or Stupidity.” And, after weighing both sides, came down on the side of Stupidity.

He asked how so many smart people could miss that so many financial instruments — Warren Buffett’s “Financial Weapons of Mass Destruction” also known as like CDO’s and Credit Swaps — were worthless, particularly when all the bankers were in constant communication with each other?

“To me, the most interesting factor is the way instant communications lead to unconscious conformity. You’d think that with thousands of ideas flowing at light speed around the world, you’d get a diversity of viewpoints and expectations that would balance one another out. Instead, global communications seem to have led people in the financial subculture to adopt homogenous viewpoints. They made the same one-way bets at the same time.”

This raises a lot of interesting issues about our use of tools like Twitter, Facebook status updates, instant messaging, mobile Skype, etc. — and how they may distort our cultural perspective. While we are not trading trillions of dollars in world markets, we are feeding into mass culture, and then measuring it.

Are we participating in a digital/marketing echo chamber? Did the potent combination of SxSW and Twitter create a false sense of our own importance?

Technorati Tags: David Brooks, Finance, New York Times, Twitter

A Retweet of “The Origins of Twitter”

About a year ago we posted a short piece about the origins of Twitter. Since then not only has Twitter become more popular (and, boy, is that an understatement!) but people have continued to post comments to our site and the original site about the first sketches of Twitter design by Jack Dorsey. Here’s our original post:

Among the recent comments, here’s something from just a couple weeks ago:

lassi.kurkijarvi says:

“This is makes an excellent case for preserving the stuff you do: document the ideas, moments of inspiration and when one day you notice that you’ve made another Twitter, you’ll have historic items such as this to show for it as well. ”

And here’s an interview with Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, by Dan Skeen.

Technorati Tags: Biz Stone, Jack Dorsey, social media, Twitter