A few days ago, Nielsen released a report about the top media trends in 2009. One of the most striking findings, highlighted by MediaPost, was that this was the year that the iPhone and the Blackberry Curve finally overtook the four year old Motorola Razr V3 as the device carried by the most US wireless subscribers.

Ultimately, it took the iPhone and the Blackberry Curve a little over 18 months to become Razr killers.

In a way, this isn’t surprising news. Unless you’ve been living under a rock since the first version of the iPhone came out in June 2007, or perhaps even if you have, you’ve heard a lot about it. The Blackberry Curve 8300, the #2 phone according to Nielsen, has also been a popular standby for RIM, and has also been on the market since 2007.

What does this have to do with Convergence Culture? People’s behavior around media is definitely changing, but these findings highlight how slow adoption of new technologies actually is among the majority of the US population. It also suggests that we still have a ways to go before the majority of Americans are being exposed to all of the possibilities of a “three screen” media world.

This piece was originally published on the Convergence Culture Consortium blog on December 15, 2009.

The campaign behind that confusing ad is actually an interesting idea that raises questions about both the challenges of joint branding and how Smartphones and the media industry could create a truly convergent marketing platform.

Below the fold:
Brand Confusion – a winning tactic?
Why the Blackberry could be a better iPod
So what?  Converging content, spreadability, social networking and location-based services

Brand confusion – a winning tactic?

Let’s start with a look at the ad itself and why my fellow theatre goers were a bit miffed.

So the confusion here is twofold: 1) what has Blackberry got to do with U2, and 2) didn’t U2 do commercials for Apple?

Let’s start by looking at the commercial itself.

A familiar image from the Life on Blackberry campaign, which promoted the Smartphones as devices for consumers' personal, as well as professional, lives (from Blackberry.com)

To recap, U2 is singing about generations changing the world, in a concert venue.  For some reason, for me and the rest of the captive audience in the theatre that day, those things don’t really scream “Blackberry” when their logo flashed on the screen.

Sure, they have been doing their “Life on Blackberry” campaign for a while, as of April 1st they have an App Store.  But Blackberry isn’t quite Apple, which is another reason why I think many of us in the theatre that day were confused.

The U2 edition iPod, circa 2004 (photo from gizmodo.com)

In the past, Apple was the consumer electronics brand that got the U2 cred.  Remember the U2 edition iPod?  Back in 2004, you could buy a special black and red device, preloaded with U2 songs.   U2 also appeared in several Apple ads with what used to be their trademark black silhouettes with white headphones dancing against a brightly-colored background, and for the first video iPod.  Although 5 years might be an eternity when it comes to marketing to the under 24 crowd, I have a feeling that many of the 20- and 30-somethings at the movies made that association, at the very least on a subconscious level.

Was that intentional?  You’d have to ask Blackberry and Arc Worldwide (the agency that created the ad) to know for sure.  Stil, creating that confusion is a little risky.  On the one hand, you might sort of turn people off and they could dismiss the whole thing as nonsensical or worse, a desperate attempt for Blackberry to make itself look hip (really, we love U2!).  But, more likely, you might intrigue people like me who like one or both of U2 and Blackberry to answer the call to action and visit the site.  And it draws an interesting (and kind of ironic) parallel between a Blackberry and an iPod.

Why the Blackberry could be a better iPod

If you actually go to the site, you’ll see what I’m talking about.  Instead of the vague statement about liking U2, you find out that there’s a “mobile album” that will be available on for download on your Blackberry smartphone.

Screenshot of URL for U2 on Blackberry.com

So, here you might say that’s just a weak echo of the iPod, watch the “teaser video”.  The campaign actually turns your Blackberry – a device known for its communications capabilities more than its media playing – into a device that integrates those elements together in this campaign, while making the Blackberry a springboard for participation that gives fans an inside track on the band.  Not only can you “hear the album” on your Blackberry, but you can also “show the world what the music means to you” and “experience the tour from all angles”.  So, not only can you listen to the music and watch videos on your Blackberry, as you can on an iPod, it looks like you can also upload photos and other content,find your friends at the concert venue through your phone, and get news and updates about the tour.

To be fair, none of these elements on its own is totally new – others have tried to use mobile devices as a way to bring people together around events.  (One example that springs to mind is CrowdFire, a tent that Microsoft set up around Outside Lands last August.)  What is different is the connection to one band, the national advertising, and creating a link to the artists through a specific device rather than a website.

It’s also interesting how they have positioned the campaign.  If you sign up on the Blackberry site to be notified when the album is available, you get an email that says you will “recieve an email alert when the experience is available for download”.  So, more than a music player, more than an application, U2 and Blackberry are creating an experience.

Screenshot of "teaser video" that gives us a hint on what the social networking elements of the U2/Blackberry experience will be (from blackberry.com)

So what?

So, what are the implications of all of this?

First of all, that the iPod and iPhone could see some real competition from other devices on this front if they can deliver better designed, more meaningful experiences to audiences.  What they haven’t been able to match in hardware, other manufacturers may be able to do in usability and relevance.

More broadly, what’s really exciting about this campaign to me is it shows us how Smartphones (and wi-fi enabled devices like the Touch) could become a major marketing platforms and an anchor for cross-media promotion.

Around an event like a product launch or a concert tour, Smartphones that deliver four crucial elements: content, spreadability/sharing, social networking and location based services.  They also reach elusive audiences like young males.  Imagine a similar application around the next Batman movie that would tell you could get tickets nearby, where your friends were sitting in the theatre, text people in your social network who haven’t seen it yet to invite them to join you at the movies and send alerts about promotions at retailers in your area or online.  What about a similar experience for the next Olympic games in Vancouver?  Or Starbucks?  Or a TV show with a complex narrative like LOST?

Until then, I’ll be waiting to try the U2/Blackberry experience.

Having dinner with some Computer Science PhD students at the Cambridge Brewing Company the other night, our conversation about business models for social media turned to the value of online advertising, specifically, how it is different than TV and why online display advertising still doesn’t bring in big money.

And, a couple of days before that, AdWeek reported results of a Forbes.com study that found that most marketers are still using direct response metrics for online advertising, based on clickthrough and conversion rates.  The article points out that search and email marketing are considered the best performers held up to that yardstick, while display and video ads are at the bottom.

On one hand, this makes complete sense, but in a medium where you can target precisely and leverage social networks and word of mouth, not using the internet for branding seems like a missed opportunity.   How could we use the web effectively as a branding vehicle, in a way that makes sense from a measurement perspective?

Direct marketing is about facilitating transactions, but branding is about facilitating relationships.  Here are some thoughts on how to build a brand relationship – and measure it – on the web.

Deltas in expression & interaction

Interacting with a brand should lead to a purchase somewhere down the line, but the it’s not a 1 to 1 exchange.   A person could interact many times with a brand online but never buy the product, or never interact with the brand online and buy the product anyway.  Or they could interact with a brand online and that could not have any bearing on their purchase behavior.

If we start on the premise that branding is about building a relationship, then a snapshot or a total (like the number of people who became fans on Facebook during a campaign) isn’t that meaningful as a metric.  Instead, looking at shifts over time is a much more material number to measure both the impact of the campaign and the position that it holds in consumer’s minds.  So, for example:

• How are the number of Facebook fans or Twitter followers changing over time?  What is the net change from the beginning to the end of the campaign?
• How does the rate of new comments, fans, or followers change over time?  What’s the attrition rate?
• How does average time spent and unique visitor volume on the site change over time?  How far does it drop off after the first visit or the initial campaign launch?

Reach + amplification

At the Cambridge Brewing Company the other night, we talked a lot about reach as one of the big reasons that TV advertising is still appealing.  In all fairness, there are some sites with big reach, but how do you reconcile volume with targeting on the web when it comes to branding?

But reach online doesn’t have to be the same as on TV. Actually, it shouldn’t be.  To me, a much more relevant metric, especially for a social media campaign or a microsite is amplification – how much the original site visitors (which we’d used to measure “reach” at a given point in time) spread the word.  Some ways to establish amplification would be to ask:

• What is ratio of new to repeat visitors over time?
• What percentage of site visitors embed or forward a video, post, or object?
• What percentage of people who visit the site share or retweet web site links, press releases or tweets using social media sites?
• How much site traffic is coming through social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, blogs (WordPress, Blogger)?
• At what rate are all of the above increasing over time?

That said, marketers should be concerned about reach within your target demographic or (even better) behavioral type, but in branding, it’s important that those people keep engaging and endorse the brand by promoting it to their networks.

Make it useful, make it multi-platform

But, how do you ensure that people come back and interact with the brand, as well as feel the need to pass things along to their networks?  Although I don’t have anything against banner ads for branding, I think branded utilities will play a big role in the future of brand advertising online because they keep coming back for a reason other than just liking the product.

Useful is a loose term, too – I think the best branded utilities are a platform for interaction with other people in a context that makes sense.  Nike is one of my favorite examples – they created a running community/progress tracking site, but there are other potential variations.  What a way for coffee shop customers to compare caffeine consumption with other conaisseurs?  Or a online travel agent application that lets people benchmark their own globetrotting against groups of people from the same region or with similar interests?

If this sounds familiar, it should – applications on Facebook, LinkedIn and, increasingly, wireless phones, have all aimed to serve this purpose.  But, as people expect to be able to jump from platform to platform, it will be the applications that enable anywhere, anytime access as seamlessly as possible that will return the biggest dividends for brands.

Not much new there.  But, a question raised in the NY Times article about the campaign caught my eye:

Still, it is difficult to measure the effects of social media — a follower on Twitter does not necessarily translate to a daily Frappuccino drinker.

A follower is probably a fan, but their act of following doesn’t necessarily signal a change of behavior, increase in reach, or direct impact on sales that marketers need to measure.

I’m not sure how Starbucks is evaluating their social media efforts, but too often this is about looking at number of followers or friends or posts or tweets over the life of the campaign. Instead, I think that a more meaningful assessment for this and other campaigns might be measuring  how brand loyalists’ participation in social media involving the company influences other people in their networks to become customers.

Here’s why I don’t think the other methods make sense and some rough ideas for tactics that I think would get meaningful social media measurements.

Preaching to the choir

As I mentioned in a previous post, I love Starbucks and, half sorry to say, am in there almost daily.  Today, I started to follow them on Twitter.  I’m also their fan on Facebook.

What does that mean for Starbucks? Because both Twitter and Facebook are about defining yourself with a public display of what you you like and what you’re connected to, most of the people who do connect themselves to Starbucks online aren’t just coming into the fold.  They’re fans, with some part of their identity tied up in that brand.

Great communication channel, lousy yardstick

From my following and friending, Starbucks gets more channels to send me messages about new products or specials, or ask me for feedback, and that is valuable, but not a great gauge of how successful a social media campaign is.  My relationship with them in cyberspace hasn’t changed how often I go there or how much I like their coffee, nor did my doing any of those things mark some sort of turning point.   I definitely don’t tweet about my (almost) daily venti non-fat cappuccinos, nor do many of my equally Starbucks-enamoured friends.  So, number of tweets or followers or friends isn’t a great way to measure how effective a campaign is, especially if you’re only looking at the numbers of participants but not what they’re saying or how much they’re getting involved.

The ideal use for social media may be a communication channel rather than a yardstick.  The value is that it can also be used to find out who the brands most devoted customers are, help them to get the word out and reward them for their support.

Post on the Starbucks Facebook Page

Starbucks is definitely taking a step in the right direction by acknowledging that support (as shown in their Facebook page post) but it’s probably not doing much to change how much coffee they’re selling – yet.

I’d argue that social networks are best used as a way to communicate with people who already love the brand and be measured that way.  Starbucks needs to set the stage for their most loyal customers to connect the coffee with their networks and make that introduction easy, pleasurable, and track-able.

Incentives, Spreadability, and Personal Connections

By helping their online fan base to spread the word about Starbucks, the company could engage with and reward those loyal customers further, and use social media to reach out to their networks.  Because Starbucks is a social and community oriented brand, tactics should stay true to those roots.  They also have a product that people buy in a store, so measurement needs to link online events with offline results.  Some rough ideas about what they could do:

Provide incentives that align everyone’s interests and keep it social.

The purpose: To identify potential brand champions, work out how effective promotions through social media are at encouraging action, and provide incentives for people to promote Starbucks to their networks.

The tactics: Starbucks loyalists probably don’t need a whole lot of incentive to take a friend or coworker to Starbucks, but that kind of brand advocacy is almost impossible to track.  A “bring a friend” referral campaign, where people following Starbucks on social media sites were sent a message with a limited time coupon for half off a second drink would enable the loyal customers to treat someone for less (and have an excuse to get another coffee).

It would also help Starbucks work out how many of their ~1.5m Facebook friends and ~188k Twitter followers were on board to evangelize the product.  If the friend likes the coffee, they could be given info on how to get the same offer, either by going online or filling out on their coupon who had referred them by Twitter name.  And give the referrer a thank you as well.

Spread the message with YouTube & Facebook at once.

The purpose: To reward fans who advocate for Starbucks by spreading the videos to their networks and bring them into the store.

The tactics: Much of the traffic to video sites like YouTube come through social networking sites; people use Facebook to spread media across their group of friends.  Fans could not just be notified that the videos are up through Twitter and Facebook, but asked to spread the word by posting it on a social networking site.  They could also be asked to post their own video about Starbucks and share it with their networks on Facebook.

If they do share a video, they should be rewarded based on the number of friends that watch, or friends could text their rating of the coffee and the referrer’s Twitter name to a number, triggering a reward for the referrer if the rating was above a certain threshold.

And finally,

Use the offline channel to grow online participation.

The purpose: To engage people who are Starbucks fans but haven’t engaged with the brand online yet.

The tactics: Not every loyal Starbucks customer is a Twitter follower or Facebook friend.  I would ask baristas to pick a few regulars at their location.  Find out if they interact with the brand online.  If they don’t, make sure they have a way to use the “bring a friend” offer (email, paper coupon),  but also let them know about the Twitter and Facebook presence and encourage them to follow or friend.  It’s also a way for people in the stores to have a conversation with those customers and let them know that their business is appreciated, face-to-face.

As the campaign evolves, I’ll be interested to see what Starbucks says about its performance.  In the meantime, I’ll still be getting my venti non-fat cappuccinos.

Although I think this type of thing is a step in the right direction when it comes to assessing the appeal of a program, I can’t help but wonder if we’re really measuring the right things.  Maybe people are “engaging” with these shows, but are they actually advocating and/or buying the brands that advertise on them more than the non-engaged viewers?

If that’s the real question we need to answer, then we might be measuring media engagement backwards.

Measurement transparency

One of the reasons it’s hard to assess what “engagement” really means in the context of TV is few organizations release details on ranking methodology.  A post on TV Decoder, the NY Times blog on television, says that the Optimedia study factors in viewership on TV, online, and mobile devices, as well as “buzz” and “advocacy”.  Although these are probably some of the right things to look at to assess engagement with a show, how you add them up makes a difference.

For example, how long a show runs in broadcast, as well as how readily available online and on mobile device platforms, and how much access the core audience has to those platforms, could have an impact.  There is also no mention of consumption via DVR, or DVD rentals or sales, or through P2P file sharing, which cold be significant in some cases.  Also, you could argue that driving out to buy a DVD, taking the time to find a show on Netflix, or wading through a P2P site to watch a poor quality copy say more about someone’s interest in a program than searching for it on hulu.

Then there’s the “buzz” and “advocacy” problem.  There are several companies that measure online audience buzz and “word of mouth”, but how to you measure it offline?  One of my friends, whenever we meet up,  encourages me to try Damages.  How do you account for that?  And how do you know which type of buzz or advocacy was actually effective to get people to watch and advocate the show to more people?

It’s hard to say much about methodology since we don’t have more details, but those are some potential issues, at least questions, I would ask the authors of the study.

But, to me,  the much more salient issue, when we’re looking at the economic viability of the current TV ecosystem is, are engaged viewers actually more likely than non-engaged viewers (or non-viewers) to buy or promote the products advertised on the show?

Advertising agency

There have been several studies on engagement that consistently seem to find that people who are “engaged” with a show tend to remember the names of the advertisers whose commercials are featured, and sometimes have a better overall impression of the brand.

The problem here is that there often isn’t a causal link, and there’s no way to get it from TV viewing alone, or even brand attitudes or recall around the show.  It’s one thing to ask an American Idol viewer if he or she remembers a Coke ad, and how they feel about Coke, quite another to link those good feelings to the crucial moment in a store when they choose or don’t choose a Coke over Pepsi.   We also don’t tend to know much about their purchase habits or behaviors after seeing the show.  Did American Idol lead them to buy a Coke even though they were regular Pepsi drinkers?  Did they suggest Coke to their friends?

Full reverse

What if we measured engagement the other way around, starting with that crucial moment in the store, seeing what Coke buyers know about American Idol, not what American Idol viewers feel about Coke?  What if we asked people who were standing, bottle of soda in hand in the grocery store (or survey recent Coke buyers online or over the phone) about how they made their choice, and if they recommended the brand to friends when they were making a choice?

Chances are, most people wouldn’t say “because Randy was drinking it on American Idol last night” – they might feel that response would make it look like they were “taken in” by product placement, or they may not even be aware that seeing Randy’s tumbler was a trigger for their choice.  However, we could also ask which programs they watch regularly, which platforms they use to watch them, how much they enjoy them, and if they encourage their friends to watch, to see if there’s a relationship between their purchase behaviors when it comes to an advertiser’s brand and how much they like and view a show.

So, approaching the question this way, we could also ask about how they advocate the advertiser’s brand and find out if people who watch a show are actually more regular, stronger or better champions of the products.  With that data, we could look at traditional TV measurement, whether it’s straight ratings or engagement or both, and work out the degree to which engagement with the program as we define it now actually translates into sales among the viewers and their networks.

If the current economics surrounding TV are to continue, engagement is ultimately about brands, not shows.  If not, the door is wide open.

Microsoft seems to hope so. This week, they announced a web-only campaign to promote the Zune as a more economical alternative to the Apple iPod. The argument used in the ad is that Zune users can get unlimited music downloads with a $15 monthly subscription, but it would cost $30,000 to fill a 120GB iPod with music from the iTunes store. They are using Wes Moss, a CFP and radio show host who spent some time on “The Apprentice” as their pitch man.

It’s no secret that consumers have heavily favored the iPod, even though they are, more or less, the same thing.  Question is, will this marketing campaign help shore up interest or sales for Zune?

My bet is that it might help a little bit, but it won’t change the game.  There are three main reasons why.

The messages don’t relate to how most people actually fill an MP3 player. Most of the people I know have an iPod or an iPhone (or both) to play MP3s, but I can’t think of a single one who sat down and bought 120GB of music on iTunes in a week, a month, or even a year or two.  People often rip the CDs they already have, get copies of MP3s from friends, and yes, download them on P2P networks.   They also put a variety of different media on their devices, like pictures, video, that also come from a variety of sources, some free, some bought through iTunes, some ripped from other forms of media they’ve already bought.  So, the whole premise of the ad doesn’t really make sense because buying $30K in songs through iTunes is not something most people actually do.  If you can’t imagine yourself buying anywhere near that many songs in a reasonable period of time, the Zune argument doesn’t really make sense.  (It turns out you can only keep 10 of the Zune Pass songs you download each month, so you can’t exactly fill your Zune for $15 the same way you fill your iPod for $15.)

Price is not necessarily a silver bullet if you don’t have a brand. Microsoft was wise to create a sub-brand for the Zune, they haven’t done a whole lot with it as yet to paint a picture for consumers about what having a Zune says about them, or enabled fans of the device to do it themselves.  This might seem trivial (especially if you think owning a Zune will save you about $30k), but it’s very real in this market.  This is a device that you use to listen to music (an expression of identity in itself) and you carry around with you.  Other people see you with it on the street – it’s a fashion item as much as it’s an MP3 player.  Do you want the (arguably) cheaper Zune, that won’t be recognized as a Zune (which wouldn’t mean much anyway), sort of looks like an iPod but isn’t an iPod?  Or do you want an actual iPod?

People may want to be thrifty, but they don’t want to feel they can’t have what they want. If you are someone who might be dropping $30K a year at iTunes and don’t care about showing a off a shiny new iPod, I still don’t think this ad would be convincing.  It’s advertising a fun product, but it’s not fun.  It doesn’t help me to imagine all of the great things I can do with the money I didn’t spend on iTunes, or how I’ll enjoy my new Zune.  A financial planner is telling me that the device that you see on the street every day is too expensive, and I should take this as the cheaper option.  Financial planners are knowledgeable about money, but they are also people who tell me I have to hold off on things I want now to get something good later.  This one in a grey suit (that sort of reminds me of the one PC guy on the Mac commercials wears) is talking about a large sum of money that’s hard to conceptualize.  And easy to tune out.

I know it’s all too easy to be a critic, so here’s what I would do instead:

• Focus on selling the Zune and the ZunePass service, not unselling the iPod. Comparisons are fine to make, but never try to beat Apple without a good counterargument for your brand AND your product.  You will lose.
• Use dollar amounts and time periods that make sense in the context of what people actually do. It’s fine to use numbers, but use plausible ones that suit the context and help people contextualize the differences.  And be honest.  You could say, for example, that ZunePass gives you the same number of songs to keep as $10 worth of iTunes, PLUS you can get what you really want by sampling as much as you like.  Less waste, more discovery.
• Don’t make price the only differentiator. This is essentially a fashion and lifestyle product, not a quart of milk.  Why not emphasize how customizable the Zune is, or show people using the music sharing features?    Part of the campaign is positioning the PC as a music discovery device – and that could carry over to the Zune, too, as a product for people who care more about the music than the image…ostensibly, anyway.
• Make Zune people too cool to be iPod people. The Zune campaign is all a little reminiscent of the recent TV commercials where shoppers go out with a pre-determined budget to buy a computer, and find a PC that meets their needs for less than a Mac. In one ad, a woman named Lauren, who can’t afford the MacBook with the screen she wants says a little sarcastically that she guesses she’s “just not cool enough to be a Mac person”.  This comes off as “I would get/consider a Mac, but can’t afford it” not “Mac people just want to buy cool, but I’m not like that”.   The Zune’s advantage in the music player space (which PCs don’t have in the world of notebook computers) is that everyone and his uncle has an iPod, but Zunes are rare.  That should make them exciting objects to see and have, not a plan B.
• Get offline. Whether it’s giving people a free Zune when they get a subscription for a certain period of time, or simply giving them away, we need to see more Zunes on the street, and they need to be distinctive.  If you’re not going to do TV, you need to reach people who aren’t seeing this online somehow.  The product can’t just live if you limit it to computer screens.
• If you can’t get Apple’s style, use humor. The current ads remind me a bit of a retirement planning commercial…there’s a man in a suit with a chart and a bunch of numbers.  Why not have fun with the comparison? A recent episode of “The Simpsons”, for example, took aim at “Mapple”.

The Dunkin’ Donuts ads that took on Starbucks also did a wonderful job of using humor to entertain, but also to take a subtle jab at their upmarket competitor, not on price, but on attitude.  It’s not saying I can’t afford a Starbucks latte or I’m not going there because I don’t know what a venti is, but asking, why would you even want to?

By the way, I love Starbucks.  And my MacBook.  But my iPod’s been crashing and freezing a lot lately so I’ve been looking into replacements.  I did seriously consider the Zune, but there’s a big problem: compatability.  I can’t play my Apple-DRM songs on it, and the software doesn’t work on a Mac.  So I’m saving up to buy an iPod Touch.  Unless someone can convince me otherwise.