FOR a guy who bets big on digital media, and is on the mark nine out of ten times, not being a Facebooker comes as a surprising revelation. “I usually log in through my daughters’ account,” reveals Rishad Tobaccowala, the chief innovation officer of Publicis Media. This honest admission came from a man who once said Starcom MediaVest Group (SMG) should operate more like a social network than a vertically integrated hierarchy. But bending conventional wisdom has been the hallmark of Tobaccowala’s two decade long career. ‘Futurist’, ‘Oracle’, ‘Innovator’ — these are some of the sobriquets assigned to Tobaccowala. Ask him about his success mantra and Tobaccowala’s quick and simple mantra is: “Question management beliefs because that’s what keeps the think-tank bubbling.”
Media strategists like Tobaccowala, and his ilk are in great demand, more so now than ever before, as advertisers race to come in first in an obstacle course of a competitive marketplace and constantly challenged by a rapidly changing media landscape. Even as the scenario demands speed and dexterity, Tobaccowala insists it’s not so much about replacing traditional media with new media platforms. “People in the world are doing four things, seeking, sharing, buying (e-commerce) and expressing. So brands which imbibe the four in its communication and marketing will do well, irrespective of whether it’s new media or traditional media,” he explains.
According to him for those looking to stay ahead of the curve it is important to look in the most unlikely of places. He says rather dramatically: “The future comes from the slime.” And given the number of times that he’s been proven right one would imagine that he knows what he is talking about. So what’s he advising his fraternity and clients these days? His advice to media professionals and clients is simple: “The future does not fit in the containers of the past.” Reinvention, according to him is the name of the game: “One must be accustomed to a permanent state of unrest and not cling to the status quo. Instigate and invent new forms of creative.”
The more we talk to him it is clear that he is not one to mince words. Tobaccowala tells us that he isn’t impressed with most solutions provided nowadays and is dismissive of those who learn Hindi and Mandarin, only because they want to get a toehold into India or China. As new media and markets grow, Tobaccowala says that what people are looking for is new ways to connect. “At times that’s scary for marketers,” he admits, but adds that one must understand that mindsets matter and not technology or language. “People with emotions matter and not machines.”
He tells us of the time when he told his client, HP, not to get into Second Life. His reasoning? It’s overhyped. “Everyone’s going for what is hot. The hottest thing is Facebook and every brand wants to have Facebook application. I ask them, why?” He points out that while theoretically it might seem like a good idea to try and sell financial products to people queuing up to buy tickets at a multiplex, it’s very likely that they simply wouldn’t be interested. “Similarly, people logging on to Facebook will not be interested in ads,” he states. An example of smart usage of new media, he says, is a site started by pet care products company, Purina:”After pornography, seeking information on pets is the next big thing in the US. The site enables pet lovers to share tips, information and videos on cats and dogs.” He also rubbishes attempts of marketers who jump on to new media bandwagons and markets. “This blind belief in the thing of the moment is where we falter. New media don’t build scale, traditional media can do that,”
So which direction does he see the world moving in?
He tells us that the future could well be Mongrel Marketing. He explains the term saying: “The future is a mish-mash of things. Take the movie Slumdog Millionaire for example. It’s a story based on Mumbai, directed by an Englishman with its music composed by an Indian,” he says. He believes that the two languages of the future are English and Internet. Those who don’t realise this according to him do so at their own peril. Tobaccowala sees loads of opportunities in the new world. However the three big trends all media people must take account are search, video and entertainment and social media. Why is search so important? He says, “It’s relevant to people but is relevant to us because of the users intent.” Think Out Of The Box
Traditional media, from television to newspapers, will continue to be important, but he thinks they need to re-evaluate and change their ways. Considering the impending gloom and doom economic scene, he says television will work because of market dynamics, discrepancies in demand and supply, which will prompt a lot of marketers to go back to basics. He reckons spends on experimental digital stuff will be toned down, nevertheless: “Marketing is increasingly happening in real time. People want what they want but they want it now! But organisations are still clearly on calendar time! That must change.” Thinking out loud Tobaccowala believes in the future, “we might have a force called Rapid Reaction Marketing Teams, men and women who can react to certain events and leverage them.”
An initiator of online advertising, Tobaccowala, who graduated in Math from Mumbai University and followed it up with a degree in marketing and finance from University of Chicago, first established himself worthy of the title ‘The Futurist’ when he convinced his boss at Leo Burnett Worldwide to spin off the interactive ad unit. This was after a decade as media buyer, account manager and researcher and his move to head the interactive unit definitely raised eyebrows as it defied logical career moves. “A senior marketing head from the client’s side tells you he doesn’t believe in traditional media and that we should do interactive marketing. So I went from Moscow to Siberia on the express. In a snap, I moved from the centre of power— creative and client services to the middle of nowhere,” he reminisces.
Soon Leo Burnett Interactive Marketing Group, with Tobaccowala at the helm, bagged its first client- McDonald’sand he stumbled upon a small time tech firm called America Online- AOL. Thus the fast food giant became the first nontech company to advertise online. In the mid-1990s at a time when the titans were gobbling up private agencies and many were rushing to Wall Street, Leo Burnett was one of few who held off on the bourse. Instead the company expanded markets and its electronic services. Tobaccowala spotted a relatively unknown production house, persuaded management to make the acquisition and nurture it as a separate entity. Hence Giant Step Productions became the first in-house company not to carry the Leo Burnett nametag (of course in 2003 things changed and Publicis Groupe snapped up Leo Burnett). Another notch in Tobaccowala’s belt is when he persuaded marquee clients like Procter & Gamble and General Motors to jump on the future train and stay committed to the Web during the downturn.
He made a career out of defying the odds and breaking new ground. To Tobaccowala, three things were clear — TV will be more important in the future (what he calls the era of visual engagement), the gap between media and creative will be a blur and the media model would go from one of segmentation of audiences to re-aggregation. Right on all three counts, he founded SMG Next, the futures practice. Then came the first online media company called SMG Digits, SMG Play, the first video-gaming unit that figured out how to place ads in games, which caught rivals napping and Reverb, a word-of mouth practice.
If there’s been a blotch on his near perfect record it would have to be in the area of search. A big miss? Yes! “Search was built by long-tail advertisers, we
were not out there first and played catch-up players with SMG Search,” he admits, but adds; “We might have missed a few, but if I could predict the future then I would have short sold all my stock early September and would have retired,” he laughs. When Jack Klues, the first-ever chairman of Publicis Media Groupe, suggested Tobaccowala should go back into a business role, he decided to build something new and make a business out of it. He took a hat full of different ideas that did not fit in the existing system and created what he calls ‘a bhelpuri of a company’, called Denuo three years ago. The “think-do” company has been configured for agility and flexibility and works on a plug-and-play model.”All the crazy ideas that didn’t gel in anywhere came into Denuo,” he says. Well, if records are anything to go by, crazy is the future.
Thursday, December 25, 2008
Saturday, December 6, 2008
Three major trends in which Internet usage is changing
Observing people’s behaviour on the internet — and in particular, on collaborative platforms like blogs, forums and social networking sites — can help marketers target their internet strategies better. A BE Knowledge@Wharton exclusive
MINI USA, the American branch of BMW’s Mini Cooper line, tracks everything being said about its brand everywhere online — in blogs, discussion groups, forums, MySpace pages and much more — then uses what it learns to guide advertising campaigns. At Hewlett-Packard, 50 executives log into their individual blogs each morning to join the ongoing online conversation about each of their product lines, immediately responding to customer problems and concerns.
Ernst & Young recruits many of the 3,500 college graduates it hires every year using a career group on Facebook, where it not only posts job information but also answers individual questions from prospective employees. And Del Monte Pet Foods uses a private online
community to regularly ‘chat’ with 400 pet lovers whose opinions help shape new products.
These are all examples of companies savvy enough to participate in the “groundswell”, according to Charlene Li, vice-president & principal analyst at Forrester Research: “The groundswell is a social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions like corporations.” Li was a speaker at the recent Supernova conference, an annual technology event in San Francisco organised by Wharton legal studies and business ethics professor Kevin Werbach in collaboration with Wharton. Li and Forrester colleague Josh Bernoff have co-authored a book on the subject, Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies. “The more you know and understand the individuals who make up the groundswell around your brand and your company, the more you can use the new social networking phenomenon to your advantage,” Li said.
Such understanding comes from going well beyond traditional user surveys, however. According to Li and other speakers at the conference, too few companies study how people actually interact with the web and utilise online collaborative tools, yet much of today’s internet revolves around individual users, the content they create, the communities they form and the transactions they choose. “People’s lives are rich and complex, so you need to get data both in the large and in the small,” said Elizabeth Churchill, principal research scientist at Yahoo! Research, whose work focuses on user internet experiences. “That means quantitative data from large groups to answer the ‘who, what, where and how’ questions, and qualitative data to answer the ‘why’ questions. For example, we know from research done by photo sharing website Flickr that while Americans are big sharers of photos, Scandinavians are not. Why? What is the cultural impact on photo sharing?”
FAILED SEARCHES & ALPHA MOMS
Looking more carefully at people’s behavior on the internet can uncover surprises, sometimes calling into question basic assumptions — for instance, that most young people are adept at using the internet. Conference presenter Eszter Hargittai, Northwestern University professor of sociology and communication studies, studied a diverse group of students attending the University of Illinois at Chicago, and found that 43% failed on a search task, based largely on their misunderstanding of internet terminology and on their inability to navigate links.
Social Studies
Hargittai reviewed research showing that people differ significantly in their understanding of various internet-related terms and activities. For example, when asked to assess their own internet know-how, women, African Americans, Hispanics and those with poorly educated parents report lower levels of knowledge than men or Asian Americans. “Since such skills are not randomly distributed among the population, certain content providers and content users stand a better chance of benefiting from the medium than others,” said Hargittai. Li agreed, citing Forrester research on the range of behavior on the web, which is sometimes based on skill and demographics, while at other times linked more to a user’s stage of life. So-called Alpha Moms “are comfortable with technology, interested in parenting, and have above-average incomes,” said Li, “but they have no time. So if you’re trying to reach them, you don’t give them blogs. You give them communities of their peers with opportunities for feedback.”
To help companies target their internet strategies, Li and Bernoff have organised Forrester research into a “social technology ladder”, which classifies consumers based on their participation in various types of social networking. At the lowest rung of the ladder are the ‘inactives’, some 44% of all US American adults who were online in 2007. Higher up are the ‘joiners’, the 25% who visit social networking sites like MySpace; ‘collectors’, an elite 15% who collect and aggregate information; and ‘critics’, those who post ratings and reviews as well as contribute to blogs and forums. Only 18% of all online Americans actually create content, publishing an article or a blog at least once a month, maintaining a web page or uploading content to sites like YouTube.
The power of such a classification lies in giving organisations a clear understanding of how consumers are behaving online, said Li. “Any successful strategy to tap into the groundswell has to begin with assessing customers’ social activities. Then you can decide what you want to accomplish, plan for how your relationship with your customers will change, and finally decide what social technology to use.”
Li is currently investigating why people move up and down this ladder of social technologies, and what are the levers companies can use to encourage consumers to act. It is critical for organisations to hone their understanding of groundswell activities, said Li, because “in five to 10 years, social networks will be everywhere.”
THE NEW BLACK
Google’s Joe Kraus agrees. Speaking at the Supernova conference, the director of product management for the search giant acknowledged that social networking is the latest fashion — “the new black,” as he called it. “But people have been endlessly fascinated by one another for a very long time. Social networking is not new; we just have new ways to do it.”
That is not to diminish the power of social computing. In fact, Kraus already sees it as the force behind three major trends in the way people use the internet. First, “the process of information discovery is changing from a solitary activity to a communal activity,” said Kraus, citing as an example his own recent behavior in choosing an anniversary gift for his wife. He searched and found that candy is traditional for a sixth anniversary, then set up a message on his G-mail account, saying he needed ideas for a candy-based gift. A friend emailed to tell him of an extraordinary baker who constructs specialty cakes and, thanks to her suggestion, his sixth anniversary gift became an elaborate cake in the shape of a colorful purse. So, said Kraus, he went from solitary information discovery to social information discovery — and a much better result than he could have achieved on his own.
Second, he said, how we exchange information is changing, from sharing information actively (emailing photos to friends) to sharing it passively (uploading those photos to Facebook and emailing notification to friends). “What’s happening is that we’re separating access from notification,” said Kraus. This leads to more sharing because people don’t worry as much about interrupting others with emails, calling attention to themselves and appearing too self-important. Third, and most important, Kraus sees the web eventually becoming entirely social. “Today, social computing is something you do at a specific site,” said Kraus. “But we’re realising that being social is not a site. It’s a concept.” We won’t get to that entirely social web, he added, until we find ways to allow users to do three things: establish a single identity to log on to many sites; share private resources such as photos or contact lists without handing out private credentials (such as an email account password); and distribute information across multiple social applications.
Google Friend Connect, a service that enables websites to easily provide social features for its visitors, incorporates three standards that respectively address each of those problems — Open ID, OAuth and OpenSocial, says Kraus. A preview version of the service was released in May. He sees Google Friend Connect as a path to the open web he predicts will arrive sooner than we imagine. “Already you can browse a site like the New York Times or Amazon, then write comments and reviews. Why shouldn’t I be able to go to the Ticketmaster site and see where my friend is sitting at a concert I want to attend, providing he wants to expose the information?” What all organisations need to prepare for, said Kraus, is a completely social web, where “your users will simply expect to be part of the conversation”.
MINI USA, the American branch of BMW’s Mini Cooper line, tracks everything being said about its brand everywhere online — in blogs, discussion groups, forums, MySpace pages and much more — then uses what it learns to guide advertising campaigns. At Hewlett-Packard, 50 executives log into their individual blogs each morning to join the ongoing online conversation about each of their product lines, immediately responding to customer problems and concerns.
Ernst & Young recruits many of the 3,500 college graduates it hires every year using a career group on Facebook, where it not only posts job information but also answers individual questions from prospective employees. And Del Monte Pet Foods uses a private online
community to regularly ‘chat’ with 400 pet lovers whose opinions help shape new products.
These are all examples of companies savvy enough to participate in the “groundswell”, according to Charlene Li, vice-president & principal analyst at Forrester Research: “The groundswell is a social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions like corporations.” Li was a speaker at the recent Supernova conference, an annual technology event in San Francisco organised by Wharton legal studies and business ethics professor Kevin Werbach in collaboration with Wharton. Li and Forrester colleague Josh Bernoff have co-authored a book on the subject, Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies. “The more you know and understand the individuals who make up the groundswell around your brand and your company, the more you can use the new social networking phenomenon to your advantage,” Li said.
Such understanding comes from going well beyond traditional user surveys, however. According to Li and other speakers at the conference, too few companies study how people actually interact with the web and utilise online collaborative tools, yet much of today’s internet revolves around individual users, the content they create, the communities they form and the transactions they choose. “People’s lives are rich and complex, so you need to get data both in the large and in the small,” said Elizabeth Churchill, principal research scientist at Yahoo! Research, whose work focuses on user internet experiences. “That means quantitative data from large groups to answer the ‘who, what, where and how’ questions, and qualitative data to answer the ‘why’ questions. For example, we know from research done by photo sharing website Flickr that while Americans are big sharers of photos, Scandinavians are not. Why? What is the cultural impact on photo sharing?”
FAILED SEARCHES & ALPHA MOMS
Looking more carefully at people’s behavior on the internet can uncover surprises, sometimes calling into question basic assumptions — for instance, that most young people are adept at using the internet. Conference presenter Eszter Hargittai, Northwestern University professor of sociology and communication studies, studied a diverse group of students attending the University of Illinois at Chicago, and found that 43% failed on a search task, based largely on their misunderstanding of internet terminology and on their inability to navigate links.
Social Studies
Hargittai reviewed research showing that people differ significantly in their understanding of various internet-related terms and activities. For example, when asked to assess their own internet know-how, women, African Americans, Hispanics and those with poorly educated parents report lower levels of knowledge than men or Asian Americans. “Since such skills are not randomly distributed among the population, certain content providers and content users stand a better chance of benefiting from the medium than others,” said Hargittai. Li agreed, citing Forrester research on the range of behavior on the web, which is sometimes based on skill and demographics, while at other times linked more to a user’s stage of life. So-called Alpha Moms “are comfortable with technology, interested in parenting, and have above-average incomes,” said Li, “but they have no time. So if you’re trying to reach them, you don’t give them blogs. You give them communities of their peers with opportunities for feedback.”
To help companies target their internet strategies, Li and Bernoff have organised Forrester research into a “social technology ladder”, which classifies consumers based on their participation in various types of social networking. At the lowest rung of the ladder are the ‘inactives’, some 44% of all US American adults who were online in 2007. Higher up are the ‘joiners’, the 25% who visit social networking sites like MySpace; ‘collectors’, an elite 15% who collect and aggregate information; and ‘critics’, those who post ratings and reviews as well as contribute to blogs and forums. Only 18% of all online Americans actually create content, publishing an article or a blog at least once a month, maintaining a web page or uploading content to sites like YouTube.
The power of such a classification lies in giving organisations a clear understanding of how consumers are behaving online, said Li. “Any successful strategy to tap into the groundswell has to begin with assessing customers’ social activities. Then you can decide what you want to accomplish, plan for how your relationship with your customers will change, and finally decide what social technology to use.”
Li is currently investigating why people move up and down this ladder of social technologies, and what are the levers companies can use to encourage consumers to act. It is critical for organisations to hone their understanding of groundswell activities, said Li, because “in five to 10 years, social networks will be everywhere.”
THE NEW BLACK
Google’s Joe Kraus agrees. Speaking at the Supernova conference, the director of product management for the search giant acknowledged that social networking is the latest fashion — “the new black,” as he called it. “But people have been endlessly fascinated by one another for a very long time. Social networking is not new; we just have new ways to do it.”
That is not to diminish the power of social computing. In fact, Kraus already sees it as the force behind three major trends in the way people use the internet. First, “the process of information discovery is changing from a solitary activity to a communal activity,” said Kraus, citing as an example his own recent behavior in choosing an anniversary gift for his wife. He searched and found that candy is traditional for a sixth anniversary, then set up a message on his G-mail account, saying he needed ideas for a candy-based gift. A friend emailed to tell him of an extraordinary baker who constructs specialty cakes and, thanks to her suggestion, his sixth anniversary gift became an elaborate cake in the shape of a colorful purse. So, said Kraus, he went from solitary information discovery to social information discovery — and a much better result than he could have achieved on his own.
Second, he said, how we exchange information is changing, from sharing information actively (emailing photos to friends) to sharing it passively (uploading those photos to Facebook and emailing notification to friends). “What’s happening is that we’re separating access from notification,” said Kraus. This leads to more sharing because people don’t worry as much about interrupting others with emails, calling attention to themselves and appearing too self-important. Third, and most important, Kraus sees the web eventually becoming entirely social. “Today, social computing is something you do at a specific site,” said Kraus. “But we’re realising that being social is not a site. It’s a concept.” We won’t get to that entirely social web, he added, until we find ways to allow users to do three things: establish a single identity to log on to many sites; share private resources such as photos or contact lists without handing out private credentials (such as an email account password); and distribute information across multiple social applications.
Google Friend Connect, a service that enables websites to easily provide social features for its visitors, incorporates three standards that respectively address each of those problems — Open ID, OAuth and OpenSocial, says Kraus. A preview version of the service was released in May. He sees Google Friend Connect as a path to the open web he predicts will arrive sooner than we imagine. “Already you can browse a site like the New York Times or Amazon, then write comments and reviews. Why shouldn’t I be able to go to the Ticketmaster site and see where my friend is sitting at a concert I want to attend, providing he wants to expose the information?” What all organisations need to prepare for, said Kraus, is a completely social web, where “your users will simply expect to be part of the conversation”.
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