The excitement over Google advertising Chrome and Search during the Super Bowl comes from two hot-spots of media attention:

1. Google Search is continually used as the prime example of the power of word-of-mouth over traditional forms of marketing: ‘…and they never spent a dollar on advertising it!’ says the social media guru.
2. The slots between segments of the Super Bowl are famously the most expensive and sought-after TV ad-spots of the year. (On the official site, linked above, a link to a video of the commercial slots was the top item when I looked!)

The Internet and the Super Bowl last intersected so heavily ten years ago, in 2000, called — at the time — ‘dotcom bowl’, when ten heavily-funded, but mostly impractical internet start-ups spanked $40mn in venture capital in order to secure the slots, at an average of $2.2mn for 30 seconds. Twelve months later, all but two of those start-ups had gone bust. Internet companies have tended to avoid the Super Bowl since then for obvious reasons.

So you might take this appearance as an indication that either Google has given in to Old Media; or conversely that the value of old media has dropped so low that even the biggest advertiser on the Internet will give it a go.

Personally, I take it as a sign of changed understandings of old and new media and of how persuasion through advertising works. Hell freezes over indeed.

Firstly, dividing old and new media into two separate, enemy camps that will have nothing to do with each other is nonsense. You aren’t a Luddite if you use TV; you aren’t progressive if you use the Web. This false dichotomy has held both sides back for too long. Old media still have massive reach compared to the Web: and telling more people about your stuff is mostly good, especially if you have a consumer product, like a new web browser, to give them. To give an example: the highly favoured Compare the Meerkat campaign — created by VCCP – had digital end-locations but depended on a massive TV, newspaper and outdoor campaign to create its success (400% increase in traffic and 80% more quotations given for client Compare the Market).

Second, Internet advertising isn’t a very good platform for persuasion. Sorry. You have one five-or-so-word opportunity and (maybe) a graphic that has to fit into a fairly small space. Most people ignore you. The people that click on your ad are stupid, bored and poor. Or are your competitors and their agents. What’s good about it is that it’s so cheap that you can throw a small amount of money at it (compared to traditional media) and create a lot of clicks, it generates great CPA information and, if correctly targeted at long-tail keywords, then yes, it sells.

It won’t change people’s minds, though. You need longer periods of time and richer engagement to do that. I read today that cinema advertising revenues went up 5% [PDF] last year. What’s that about – apart from creative agencies loving them? It’s about the realisation that advertising-as-experience (and therefore, ‘something that might influence someone’s opinion’) still doesn’t happen very often, predictably or inexpensively on the Web.

This is the truth. We live our lives not offline or online, but inline. We’re continually in both spaces and don’t draw much distinction between them, contrary to what a lot of commentators would have us believe. This is especially true of younger people, who’ve grown up with the Net at their side. We don’t ‘jack-in’, as Neuromancer and countless successors imagined, we accommodate.

[PS. Throwing irony upon irony, this is also the year that Pepsi, long a Superbowl standard, decided not to bother and devote the money to social media *cough* philanthropy instead.]

[PPS. What I wonder about is why Google cares so much about Chrome? It’s given none of its other products, consumer or business, remotely the same funding or attention…]

In mitigation of my not being able to think of anything interesting to write about today, I shall pass on several thousand words by other people, published by The Society of Digital agencies (SoDA). It’s a survey and editorial on what members of the society think 2010 holds for digital media marketing.

It’s a 70-page PDF, but don’t worry too much about the apparent weight — it’s all microchunked into big charts and easily-digestible 500-word thought pieces from the leaders of a number of digital agencies.

Overall, the outlook is bullish:

• 81% of Brand Execs expect an increase in digital projects for 2010
• 50% will be shifting funds from traditional to digital media
• 78% of global participants believe the current economy will actually spawn more funds allocated to Digital

Two Thousand and Ten Digital Marketing Outlook

hat tip: iboy

AdWeek covers a story that most people working in the digital sector will already have had some intuition of:

Forrester Research conducted a “state of interactive agencies” survey of about 100 global interactive marketers. It found just 23 percent believed their “traditional brand agency” is capable of planning and managing interactive marketing activities. About 46 percent did not believe them capable, with the rest neutral on the question.

While that held good news for digital agencies, particularly as digital becomes a much larger part of marketing, Forrester found few clients are willing to give them responsibility for the brand’s direction. Just 22 percent agreed that their interactive agency is “ready to lead my brand.” Another 33 percent said their digital shops aren’t ready, with the rest neutral.

via ‘Great Race’ Between Traditional, Digital Shops.

In brief: clients think traditional agencies can’t be trusted to do online; digital agencies can’t be trusted to lead.

The article postulates a ‘Great Race’ as traditional agencies struggle to acquire digital skills and people, while digital shops expand their offerings to include more mainstream marketing activities to prove their wider competence.

The trouble here is that it slows down and distracts both sides.

Initially, at least, they are likely to do a poor job of imitating their competitors on the other side, despite sinking what probably seems like an inordinate amount of resource into them. The two sides come with very different mind-sets in the majority of cases, and adjusting to the world of mainstream brand marketing or interactive media will be a painful and slow process that will inevitably involve several failures.

I am sure that there are some marvellous full-service agencies, but when I look at the ones I come across, it emerges that they’re actually formed of five or six different business centres created through acquisitions and spin-offs.

While they’re busy getting nowhere fast, new disciplines like interactive signage or phone apps appear, and specialised agencies pop up to fill the gap. Neither the digital nor traditional agencies have a handle on these disciplines because they have been spending all their time watching their competitors.

So now there are three, four, five and more agencies looking for a slice.

I’m not convinced that getting involved in the Great Race is likely to lead to a winning position. Better surely, to display leadership, integrity and genius in the bit that you’re actually good at?

On the other, crikey, there are an awful lot of digital folk working in PR nowadays. And digital outfits that ‘do’ PR. And journalists who’ve crossed over to both, for that matter.

So I am less biased than you might imagine.

Last night’s NMK event – What Happens to Online PR? – covered a lot of bases. What exactly is PR; what is Online; and what is needed for the industry to gain some leadership in the online space?

The room was heavily dominated by people at the forefront of reinventing PR. People who are already moving well beyond press relations into the guardianship of reputation and the formation of real relationships — both in digital and analogue. Or is that backwards in time? Panellist Stuart Bruce maintained that PR was never about the press, and always about looking after and promoting reputations and establishing and growing relationships.

There is, as everyone knows, a land-grab going on. Everyone in the marcomms space, from designers to planners, is on their toes (unless they’re rubbish) to find a reason to suggest that it is they who should lead in digital. The people who gain a credible early lead will probably be able to maintain that, and the people who don’t will wither away.

For pure digital agencies, their case is clear: we grew up in this space; we know and understand it best; we’re the geeks that you used to call the back-room boys (and girls). But now things have changed. Now online isn’t something separate, it’s everything. If you want the best skills and insight in everything, then call us.

On the PR side the case is clear but muddied by 100 years of history and culture. At its purest, Public Relations is about reputation management and relationship management. It’s about the strategy behind communications policies as much as executing those policies.

At the execution level, it’s about crafting, creating and sustaining stories which will work with those relationships and bolster or protect that reputation.

At its not so pure, PR is about coverage and column inches; it’s about billing on AEV; it’s about hitting the front page of the FT; it’s about whacking out a press release every 2 minutes about anything that you can loosely associate with a client (I received about 10 budget-related press releases today, most of which were totally spurious).

As everyone who works in media knows, sadly, you get ten times as much contact from the bad end of the scale than you do from the shining knights. That’s how spam works: if the conversion rate is 0.000001%, then you send 1,000,000 emails. If it’s lower, you simply send more.

As both sides of the panel last night agreed, this is not sustainable. Maintaining relationships and building reputation depends on adding value, not taking it away. There are agencies that I (and presumably a lot of other journalists) have blacklisted – and they will never be able to recover from that.

So, the way forward for PR agencies: stay still, integrate, specialise or outsource?

Stay still: you die. And you deserve to. You shouldn’t be on this blog. Go away.

Lots of agencies are integrating. Bringing in digital media people, or hiring PR graduates with that inclination: bunch them together and call them the digital team; maybe bringing in a heavy-hitter who’s well-known in the pure digital space; maybe even buying out a digital agency to call their own. (You know I could name and shame here, but I won’t). Problem: 80% of your agency has no clue what the hell you do. They won’t be able to sell, explain or justify your projects to clients. You’ll be working 24/7 to stay still.

Or specialise. Become an online PR agency. Lots of geeks; lots of analytics; project managers. This has been a good model for the last couple of years. The problem? The people who hold the purse strings don’t trust you johnny-come-latelies with your flip-flops and skateboards one bit. Especially when it comes to reputation. A bunch of internet guys? Are you having me on? Sure you can do my website, but corporate reputation? Yeah, riiight.

Or outsource. You do your bit on strategy and then outsource the bits you haven’t got the skillz for to the best pure digital players available. This agency for your SEO, that one for your design and the other for your social strategy. There’s lots of danger here, too. Your outsourced agencies are also your competitors. Because they all want your lunch money. Also, you’ve increased your costs massively in most cases. You’ve also got a whole bunch of communication issues to resolve – not easy ones, either, because everyone in marcomms has an ego the size of a planet.

So not any of those things, really.

Start again. No, really.

Start again.

Integration, specialisation and outsourcing aren’t going to work as plausible business models in the long term. I think we all know that. You need an agency that is Digital and PR. An agency focused on relationships and reputation, but wholly grounded in today’s arena of communications. Then you win.

I’m not an entrepreneur, I’m a hack, but I hear all the arguments, all the time; I hear all the stories, every day. A lot of you have already started again. The rest of you will not survive except through brute force and a lot of that will involve layoffs.

Start again.

[I’ll create a post on NMK collating discussion so far, but in the meantime:

Steven Waddington published before the debate but agrees “real threat is not the contraction of the industry but the army of new digital agencies that is capitalising on the disruption in the market”

Gerel Orgil offers the two-minute version — very useful indeed — I’d forgotten half of what she recorded.

Roger Warner great summary and a real call to learning and education — you risk losing the opportunity to learn! “the threat to a traditional PR agency isn’t just in losing a slice of Online business, it’s in losing the right to learn about it.”

Lloyd Gofton says the winning agencies will have the right blend of skills.

Jo-Rosie Haffenden condemns “an industry which is not as excited as it should be about change”.

Danny Whatmough didn’t turn up but favours a media mix: “no one group will dominate and that there will be plenty of new tricks to learn and plenty for everyone to practice”.

Jed Hallam promised to help with the hats and coats, didn’t, but instead offers a great post on “influence and social mechanics”.

Peter Hay crikey — old media loves us too.]

One for the agency folk.

http://view.break.com/542649 — Watch more free videos

Found another copy!