Dec

1

London Online lingering memories..

Filed Under B2B, Blog, internet, Publishing, STM | Leave a Comment

If I am not careful this blog will go travelogue.  Yet I must record the fact that after yesterday’s rigorous briefing from the Noah event, I spent today at the annual London Online event, Online Information 2009, at Olympia.  I notice that they have stopped saying how many of these events have taken place.  We certainly exhibited Eurolex here in 1979 (it was then in the Hammersmith Novotel), so it has been an annual pilgrimage for me for 30 years.  It is now smaller than its peak Olympia size, but still retains a core of exhibitors from those early days, and a focus on STM, B2B, and, more recently, on the tools and programs associated with database service development and search.  I love it, and I hate it .

I love standing in a central aisle and meeting again so many of the people that I know in this industry, and reflecting on the brightness and the kindness so commonly found in this sector.  I hate the stuffy complacency all too often  associated with publishers defending fixed positions and pretending that users are really satisfied with what they are given.  I love the idealism associated with invention, and attempts to change markets, just as I hate the refusal to innovate until the cliff-edge looms.

Today my highlight was Mark Holland of Gale/Cengage introducing and launching the new Financial Times archives online.  When I think how many such archives Mark has launched, I reflect with wonderment on his ageless enthusiasm, and wish he and his colleagues every success with this new addition.  I was also very taken by the continuing development of Ovid SP, a story of phased vertical search development and integration which is now an excellent case study, with the integration of eBooks, the addition of Chinese language services, and the continued development of specialised service and domain sectors – take psychology, or nursing, to represent varieties within these categories.  And a newcomer?  If you go in the next two days look at Get Abstract, an abstracting service for business books, which demonstrates that you can take an age old idea like A&I and give it a shine in a new context.

Will I go next year?  Of course, all those wonderful people draw me back.  And even as I complain about my aching feet, I know that the next stand I see will have something almost completely new …or so I hope.

Nov

27

After Advertising …

Filed Under Blog, Industry Analysis, news media, online advertising, Publishing, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

I have been researching things to put in the download section of this site, and found in the Digital Attic (aka Google) an article I wrote in 1995 predicting the Death of Advertising.  Now that we are seeing it happen, in print and in less 0bvious ways in online services, this may seem clever stuff (not just a Worlock but a Wizard too!).  Pause, though, gentle reader: in 25 years of writing about the digital marketplace I have predicted the Death of most things, so I am bound to get a few right – you should see me on the death of the novel, the death of copyright etc etc.

However, in 1995 I did not need to say what happened next, since no-one at all believed the first assertion.  Now a great many go as far as the first claim, but then we all stop dead.  What next?  For a time it seemed as if lead generation would fill the revenue gap.  Maybe the function of promotions and listings is simply to produce a qualified marketplace. Well, arguably it is, but people like Jeff Jarvis seem to be arguing that if we produce real community in the network then community members will sell to each other – and far more effectively than current advertisers.  So advertising and sponsorship become pure exercises in brand promotion, and are required a lot less.  If we really want to sell our organic muesli to the health conscious middle class, we have to find where they gather en masse, and then promote the idea by product placement or community agencies.

But first we need to know where our brand resonates and in what communities.  Look at www.media6degrees.com, and I think you are looking at a prototype for doing just that.  Then there is something called the 33Across SocialDNA platform: the idea here is that you identify existing customers and then “identify and anonymously target people with strong real world connections” to those existing customers.  The science of risk management turns inside out to become the art of customer identification.  European privacy commissars shudder, but check out an interesting article on this company at www.adexchanger.com.  And then look at LotameCC , the oldest player in this game (founded in 2006), which captures social media data like blog postings to create what they are kind enough to call “the data driven future of advertising”.

And that is the issue really – the things we are fiddling around with currently change advertising by narrowing its focus, making it less obtrusive, making it more predictive, getting better results with less effort/spend  etc.  And what we want is not advertising, but a way of getting sales messages to people who want those messages.  Something tells me that we are not there yet, but meanwhile the efforts being made are deeply interesting.

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