With summer musical festivals there’s still a lot to look forward to on the music scene in 2010. But this isn’t a collection of up-and-coming artists or a rant about Ticketmaster. Instead, it’s a collection of upcoming developments that will how we obtain and consume music- coming soon to a digital device near you.
Sharing all of your music across the internet to any device
Earlier this year, Google acquired Simplify Media in a move that will open digital syncing services to the masses. Simplify Media provided a service that let you seamlessly share music and photo libraries through the web.
There’s an old statistic my dad used to say to me. “The Saturday edition of the Toronto Star contains more knowledge than a person living in the 16th Century got in their entire lifetime.” It made no sense to me why anyone would want this much information. The funnies were about the only section useful to my sixth-grade self. Everything else just seemed to get in the way.
Today you can access the Saturday editions of every major newspaper in the world online. You can also get near-instantaneous Wikipedia entries, tweets, blogs, RSS updates, and tons more, all of which makes it even harder to separate information you want from information you don’t. Enter Web 3.0, a.k.a. Semantic Web.
Web info overload and why Web 3.0
This iteration of the web promises to better serve users with a smarter search system. In addition to 2.0’s content creation and 1.0’s system of content delivery, 3.0 aims to manage content as well.
In this post, I’d like to outline a handful of techniques and technologies we as creators for the web can employ today. Although some of these methods are only available in more modern browsers, I hope to explain how we can still maintain support and offer alternative solutions for older browsers.
A Bit of History
Back in 1997, I had just began dipping my feet into web development — more specifically HTML. Later that year, a new version of the HTML specification was to be released, known as “HTML 4.0”. Three U.S. Presidents, a dot-com bust and a housing bubble later we find ourselves still writing the same old HTML, now “HTML 4.01”. CSS shared a very similar story. Technicalities aside, my point is simply this: HTML and CSS have not seen a new major release of their specifications in several years.
The Future Is Now
You may have heard that there are two new kids on the block: HTML5 and CSS3. Although both of these specifications haven’t been finalized, modern browsers are beginning to implement features of HTML5 and CSS3. Of course, older browsers don’t have most of these features, but that’s okay.
Think about this for a moment: we’re still supporting and trying to create “pixel perfect” designs for Internet Explorer 6, a browser shipped with Microsoft’s nine year old operating system Windows XP. Let me say that again, we’re still designing websites that are meant to look exactly the same in modern browsers like Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome but also a browser that is almost a decade old. Sad, but true.
Here’s where I propose we ditch that old idea and start using something I call “pixel imperfect” designs by using a well known strategy called Progressive Enhancement. Essentially, one design does not fit all browsers anymore. We need to accept the fact that browsers ARE different and they each offer their users different capabilities. We’ll need to start creating variants of our designs to show the potential experience in both modern and legacy browsers. What’s great about using Progressive Enhancement is that we can design our solutions in a way that less capable browsers still receive a great experience because we’re simply “layering” on new features that more capable browsers will utilize when they’re supported.
Implementations
Font Embedding
Arguably one of the most (if not THE most) important additions to CSS3 is the official support for embedding fonts. No longer are we stuck with having to cut images or use Flash when we want to use fonts not considered “web-safe”. We can use whatever fonts we want as long as the seller of the font permits web embedding. Several font providers like Typekit and FontShop are already providing solutions for embedding fonts on the web.
No more opening up Photoshop to do minor copy tweaks, or re-cut all of a site’s images containing copy when we want to translate it to another language, or using slow Flash solutions unsupported by most mobile platforms.
The best part about CSS3 font embedding: it’s supported in virtually all browsers used today! That includes Internet Explorer 4+, Firefox 3.5+, Opera 10+, Safari 3.1+, and Chrome 4+.
Mobile and emerging technology have historically had more hype than actual adoption or implementation within marketing campaigns; but with the proliferation of mobile devices and digitization, the mobile channel is slowly becoming a necessity rather than a novelty. In this post, I wanted to address key developmental areas of mobile and their impact on customer experience and engagement.
Traditional & Mobile Integration in Marketing
From an integrative marketing standpoint, the mobile device can be seen as an extension of the brand experience; it’s what connects the end user with the brand messaging. Mobile is often an overlooked or undervalued channel of communication but in reality, it’s one of the most personal forms of communication in this digital world. When campaigns are successfully crafted and executed, the channel that connects the end user with the message has the power to change both brand perception and consumer behavior. With that said I believe we will continue to see more brands create mobile campaigns or initiatives that complement traditional marketing channels while allocating a significant amount of their advertising budget towards mobile and emerging technologies.
Advertising
The recent launch of the Apple iAd platform will only further prove my point that there will continue to be a major marketing shift and emphasis on mobile within integrated marketing campaigns. The iAd platform allows developers to create beautiful and rich advertising executions that are less disruptive and reach the consumer at the intersection of emotion and interactivity. In addition to this innovative approach, the developers will retain 60% of revenues which have already shown signs of success. Obviously, these signs of success are due more to novelty rather than active engagement and interest, but the iAd platform is definitely a step in the right direction for advertisers.
Payment
Mobile commerce is another key area of significant growth that is driving adoption and new users. With more brands integrating traditional and mobile campaigns, allowing consumers to easily pay for various products and services on-the-go will benefit both parties. Apples iTunes payment system is a great example of quick, convenient one-click purchasing. During the D8 conference, eBay CEO, John Donahoe, discussed the adoption of the mobile device as a way to pay for goods and services. Donahoe explained that the mobile delivered $600M last year and will deliver $1.5B to $2.0B in revenue to eBay this year.
Do you remember when Facebook was a college-only network? You could only join the website if you had a valid university email and you knew, no matter what, the only people that would be able to find you would be college buddies. As a measly high school-er at the time, I was very disappointed that I would not be able to join too. But lo and behold, right when I became a high school senior, the flood gates opened and everyone was able to join Facebook. And in an instant, everything changed.
All social networking sites have come miles from where they started. Even Foursquare, which is relatively new to the game, has changed dramatically since it first went live. Location based services are now all the rage, while “liking” something has become a universally understood verb. But now what? What is next for these communication beasts? These sites create ‘citizen journalists’ out of all of us and people are taking this responsibility in all different directions. In fact, many people have accepted the role of breaking news on sites like Twitter and Facebook, which opens up a whole new can of worms.
Citizen journalism through social media sites has become a recently accepted trend. People Tweet about political elections and World Cup winners even before news outlets have a chance to process the facts. So when it comes to being citizen journalists (as we all have) and that little issue of freedom of speech, should there be a line drawn when it comes to breaking news?
Take for example, General Stanley McChrystal. Most of you probably followed the story about how the General made inappropriate remarks to a Rolling Stone reporter during an interview. Afterwards, you probably found out that he stepped down from his position and was replaced by General David Petraeus. But you probably also found this entire story out before the issue of Rolling Stone took the stand. The story was buzzing around the Internet, and particularly social networking sites, before anyone could contain it. Yes, everyone was going to find out eventually. But is it really our responsibility to break news as big (and possibly sensitive) as this? According to Twitter and our very own government, yes it is.
In attending the recent Mobile University event in Chicago (produced by the Heartland Mobile Council), one idea kept banging at the door of my brain. Working at a digital agency, most of the content wasn’t brand new to me, but it was extremely interesting to see that it is very much still new to brand marketers. “Demystification” was a common theme. Conversations throughout the day focused on starting small and strategically planning mobile efforts that make sense for your brand. That all fits nicely underneath the Education umbrella. But while it’s extremely important for us all to know where the masses stand (and take it on as a mission with our clients!), I was more interested in the associated comment that we are our own barrier to the potential of mobile. In short, we’re just not there yet. But we could be. At the risk of sounding naive and idealistic, the possibilities are truly endless.
There are countless manifestations of mobile technology that are no where near mainstream yet. I would love to say “that we haven’t even thought of yet” but I think there are some smart kids out there who are ahead of the curve… See the MOCOM2020 video above. Those smart kids just need to keep working out the kinks and then tackle the biggest challenge of all. The demystification. Tackle the early adopters and the influencers and then we can work as a crowd to help prove the value and show the world how this will transform our lives.
In the meantime, I wanted to share some of the smart mobile ideas surfacing lately. Creative Director, Jim Kim spent time in CM’s own Mobile U follow-up to look into the future. He expanded our minds, sharing trends, excellent execution examples and the following “Up and Coming” opportunities in mobile. Here are my 5 favorites. Shout-outs to the providers Jim mentioned, but we know there are other groups working on the same ideas too.
1. AR browsers for mobile: Layers of data embedded in the real world around you that you can toggle between. Applications for real estate, food & entertainment, retail. This use of augmented reality will become how we live; not just an app. But will we be holding up our phones for long? (Check out Layar. View their demo)
2. Augmented Mobile Profile: A social user interface implementation of your public profile. Real time information about the people around you and their entire “clouded” identity–from business card to playlists, Facebook profile to thought capitol on Slideshare. One of the ultimate social/mobile integrations I’ve seen. (Check out TAT Augmented ID.View their demo)
3. The Active Idle Screen: Replaces your current homescreen with personal and valuable information (weather, trivia, sports scores, horoscope, etc.) in addition to advertisements for deals/coupons. Will reach the lowest common denominator audience. (Check out Mobile Posse)
4. QR codes without the QR: Recognizing that camera phones are crappy, we can analyze the photos. Take a picture of something and you receive contextual results around it. Mixed with geotargeting, this becomes very powerful. (Reviews, Where to buy, etc.) (Check out Mobot. View the demo)
5. Data Conformity: Location-based content and services are the promise of mobile marketing. But it has to work across all devices, content providers, and mobile carriers–one of today’s greatest challenges. When the great aggregator arrives, it will help to bring data conformity and data consistency. (Check out Useful Networks)
What other glimpses into the future of mobile technology have you seen recently? How about killer executions?
Katie is Associate Marketing Manager and EM Blog Administrator.
Jim is Creative Director for Bud, Autotrader and Vegas accounts.
I recently had a truly extraordinary retail experience when taking my son to visit the LEGO store out at Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg (IL). The store layout, staff assistance, merchandising, customer-centric focus, the use of technology and overall shopping experience I had there made me stop in my tracks and recognize this was worth documenting. We say that we are in the business of creating extraordinary experiences at CM—and I strive for that every day in my work. But it is an experience like this in my personal life that helps me step back and reframe what “extraordinary” means any why we strive so hard for that bar.
It was such a blast that I decided to capture the ways that the LEGO store engaged customers, kept them in the store (for hours at a time) and pulled in foot-traffic in an otherwise gigantic and distracting 300 store mall. What better way to do that than in pictures, so you can see what I saw—and what LEGO fanatics keep coming back for.
Some of the “Extraordinary” highlights I noted during my LEGO experience were:
Timeliness is of benefit in this industry, and although Facebook’s announcement of the open graph protocol happened an eternity ago by web standards, I feel in this case the ramifications of such an event demand a step back. To say that the open graph protocol is ‘revolutionary’ is in my opinion an understatement. Many will say “Facebook is late to the game. Google, Yahoo and MySpace all have a shared standard for OpenID through OpenSocial, ergo, this is a non-event”. My reply to that is simply, not really. Nothing has been done at this level. Not to mention none of those services come near Facebook in terms of user-engagement. I don’t think we’ll fully realize how profound this moment is for a number of years. And I don’t just mean in terms of the internet. This has the potential to change the way we buy products, how we react to world events, what music we listen to and how we find it, among many other things. I won’t say it’s a ‘good thing’ as that is, and will remain, a point surrounded in a great deal of debate. I will however say that I believe this is certainly a moment worth looking at.
On the surface it seems as though Facebook is attempting in this moment to centralize the internet around it’s own service. Of course they don’t word it that way, “The open graph puts people at the center of the web.” says CEO Mark Zuckerberg “It means the web can become a series of personally and semantically meaningful connections.” Sounds vaguely positive to me, and if the new Facebook graph protocol seemed slightly confusing to you at first, you’re not alone. I was scratching my head a little too, so I’ll start by explaining it’s core functionality and then I’ll expand on the merits of each point.
It all starts with social plug-ins; these allow Facebook to be ported pretty much anywhere. When you visit a site that’s using social plug-ins, you’ll be able to see all the people in your network who have visited before, what they did there and if they recommend or ‘liked’ anything on the page. This to me represents the nail in the coffin when it comes to digital channel convergence. Once Facebook roots itself in the online experience with social plug-ins we can no longer consider social a channel at all. It becomes the experience, and instant personalization is the result. Of course user-engagement and the ubiquity of the plug-in will effect how personal your experience can be. Facebook has addressed this by using cookies and iFrames to remember a user no matter where they are in addition to providing developers with a far simpler, robust API and an open authentication protocol called OAuth.
The site level component, Facebook’s ‘like’ button, adds further functionality using the open graph protocol. If I decide I ‘like’ something while I’m online (it could be anything; music, images, videos, books, products, you name it) I can use Facebook’s universal ‘like’ button and the site will create a connection between me and that object. Best of all, the connection can include semantic data (like type, color, genre, location, etc.) and appears as an object in Facebook with it’s own set of functionality. The communication is not one way either, sites can correspond directly with the subset of users who’ve decided to hit the ‘like’ button.
How many of your banners are running on x-rated sites?
How many are running below the fold?
Or running in countries outside the US?
Now the moment of truth: Does the network you’re partnering with even know the answer to these questions?
As networks and exchanges continue to expand, it becomes more difficult for them to provide the 100% transparency they promise. Recently we’ve seen companies, such as Double Verify, step into the vendor space and try to police it. Double Verify uses their detection technology to find: hidden iframes within network properties that lead to x-rated sites, banners running below the fold beyond what you were promised, or impressions that have been incorrectly geo-targeted. But can these ad verification companies really stop the corruption happening behind the scenes? The answer… Not really. As Brian Morrissey points out, “Misplaced ads aren’t a problem unique to the Internet, but the digital medium, with its millions of sites, magnifies the risk.”
These protection tools do a great job of crawling the web and finding fraud. Once fraud is discovered, the agency verifying tool and the network vendor discuss where the error occurred and what to provide in added-value to cover the mistake. But that’s really only solving the problem one brand at a time. Will this monitoring insert enough fear into the hearts of networks to begin their own process of weeding out bad site partners and poorly monitored targeting techniques? I think that’s something we’ll have to wait and see. As Morrissey reported from a source at Media Math, “The future is in the prevention technologies.”
In the meantime, tools like Double Verify can help regain impressions lost to banner fraud while keeping networks in check. But that is still one site negotiation at a time and it happens after the fact. For brand-driven clients, they need to demand more of networks and hold them accountable. To implement these crawlers (without a fee to the advertiser), verifying partners need to be alerted and fees need to be negotiated into each partnership insertion order to ensure that campaigns are tracked correctly. Or as a co-worker of mine put it, “It seems like agencies have to do double the work just to get an honest view of a campaign. Shouldn’t the networks do this for us?”
I suspect in time the advertising networks will start to feel the pressure of someone watching their every move and begin to implement more defenses on their own exchanges to prevent this type of fraud… or they might just sit at their desks with their doors closed and hope this whole verifying thing just blows over.
What should smart marketers do in the meantime? While the fraud tools aren’t perfect, they’re still a step in the right direction. Ensure that Double Verify (or a similar vendor like Cyveillance, Adsafe, or Collective Networks) is part of every network buy. If not for any of the reasons listed above, it will help show which networks are committing a higher level of fraud and help guide you to choosing correct network partnerships for future campaigns.
Anna Mer is a Media Manager out of the Chicago office.
There’s a lot being written about the iPad – reviews, new applications, the ongoing debate on Flash, what the device does and what it doesn’t do.
Beyond the device, however, there are some implications and the longer-term impact it will have as we create digital experiences. New devices and interfaces have a profound impact on consumer expectations, competitive moves, and the evolution of digital interfaces. The Wii ushered in new interface concepts and ideas. Same with xBox and xBox Live. The iPad will do the same in its influence on the conventions and expectations of our industry.
We have several of the Wifi iPads in our offices and have had a number of discussions with our team about its implications. Some see immediate opportunities for the iPad to ‘fit in’ to their lifestyles. Others are still debating if it replaces something or is a supplemental access and consumption device. It’s bigger than a phone with no ability to do more than SKYPE calls. But it’s not quite a notebook with all the file access and productivity tools – so the iPad makes compromises in both directions. The limitations will change in time as new applications, new peripherals, an updated OS, and improved connectivity come.
One thing the smartphone and iPad do is to force a focus on ‘what’s important’ versus ‘what’s possible.’ As sites or applications evolve, they become more bloated, more confusing, and lose the punch they can have. Redesigns of a site or an application can be liberating, in removing the old conventions. But invariably we worry about ‘moving the cheese’ of the habituated consumer and thus add rather than subtract in making experience design tradeoffs. This is where Apple and the developers of iPad apps demonstrated tremendous courage in leaving behind the conventional interfaces and tools. We need more courage to advance the customer experience.
What’s the take away after a week of using the iPad from an experience standpoint?
Here are the 7 Areas of Implications for digital marketers:
#1 – Fragmentation.
Josh Bernoff (Forrester) wrote about the Splinternet earlier this year. That theme is in full force on the iPad. Media and content fragmentation continue as new devices enable content consumption in new and different formats. Information ubiquity that started with the smartphone is further exacerbated with a new form factor. iPhone apps that are played on the iPad look OK, but you’re much more engaged by an iPad native app. The need for liquid experiences that adapt to the screen become even more important as we look at alternative form factors.
#2 – Development Challenges.
We have to think differently about how content and experiences are created, disseminated and maintained. Monolithic frameworks start to break down when there are hundreds of thousands of developers creating new experiences. And with Apple changing their developer terms and conditions, it looks like Apple will expect you to use their tools and frameworks, rather than many of the cross-platform frameworks. We have several clients working with Android, iPhone, Blackberry and other instances for applications. The iPad and follow-on products from other vendors based on Windows 7, Chrome, or Android tablets will further exacerbate the challenge of consistency and maintainability.
#3 – Personalization.
We’re at the early stages of more personal (and relevant) consumption of media – that means the customer is even more in control of the experience. Most will seek out an application rather than a web browser to consume their content where possible. Android, the iPhone OS, Windows Phone 7, Blackberry are all targeting what Mary Meeker with Morgan Stanley says will be a bigger market than the desktop PC market by 2014. The browser lives on at the desktop, but many of these new devices will take a very different approach to content and experience access. Remixing content from feeds, apps, alerts, and personalized experiences will become even more important. Add in the intersection of social to these experiences and you quickly see that use cases with these new devices will become even more personal.
Alan Dodaro | Critical Mass Chicago
As networks and exchanges continue to expand, it becomes more difficult for them to provide the 100% transparency they promise. Recently we’ve seen companies, such as 
Entries (RSS)
Sign Up for Updates