Trends underpinning digital brand strategy
Patrick Collings
Sagacite Brand Agency
Cape Town
December 2008
by Atzu - http://www.flickr.com/photos/atzu/2860423758/sizes/o/in/set-72157606029559521/

i am a digital immigrant

8
trends

The flow, not the contours
Talking to the listener
The art of gliding
15MB is the new 15 minutes
The third screen
Our virtual reality
Always informed everywhere
Reassembling the fragmentation

The flow, not the contours

from mainframe to desktop to internet

internet explorer rapidly losing ground to firefox

myspace sharing social networking with facebook and others

traditional newspapers abandoning the presses for the web

mainstream media battling bloggers

traditional blogging sharing space with micro blogging

altavista was king before google, will cuil manage to dent the colossus

understand where your market is
going and why it is going, but
appreciate that the vehicle for getting
there will probably change

photo by Oliver Wilke (http://www.flickr.com/photos/counterxattack/2827812861/sizes/o/)
Talking to the listener

just because you built it does not mean
they will find it

it’s a big universe out there

1.5bn | 0.3%
internet users and the percentage from south africa

51m | 10%
internet users in africa and the percentage from south africa

12m | 0.03%
active blogs and south africa’s contribution

340m | 0.5%
global blog audience and percentage reading south african blogs

beware
the closed ecosystem

they may not find you as you intended
them to

1
blog facebook
link app 2
digg 3
listing
blog
article
audience
rss
feed

and if they find
it, it does not
mean they will
listen to you

few / much
many / little

if content is king, then relevant content
will rule empires

but, mostly, it is about
having a conversation

to talk to your audience you need to
understand where they are “listening”,
what they are willing to hear and listen to
what they have to say

The art of gliding

you are not inyou think you are
control
even when

GM’s Chevy Tahoe SUV
video clip of user generated tahoe “commercials”

today, everyone can be a director

video clip of user generated polo “commercial”

collection of guinness ads

video clip of non-sanctioned guinness ad

“... they have to keep on consistently building their
brands equity so that when a potentially damaging
piece of communication does filter out into the
world, their brand is strong enough and their
consumers are savvy enough to understand its
source is the public domain.”

your brand does not
need you to be online
others will put it there

invisible

small

watch it

increasingly need to be there

empower

engage, or not

integrate

don’t fake it

don’t box the demographic

7 = soaring + gliding + influencing

accept the loss of complete control
and become part of the experience
and conversation

15MB is the new 15 minutes
video clip of ad men employment ad
ipod photo by Вася Артёмов (http://www.flickr.com/photos/78518472@N00/2274202900/)

as a society we are
becoming more visual
“video beats pictures beats text” - trendwatching.com 2008 report

what sort of numbers are we talking about

five billion
videos serves each month by youtube
44 percent
of all online video consumption
in the U.S.A.

embedded video clip of instructional video

what about the news media

news media is promoting video offline
south african media organizations developing
plans with video as an integral offering

4 Guidelines

you have to be seen

integrated part of brand
communication

parts are greater than
the whole

must entertain

speaking of entertainment

branded
entertainment
the future is inside, not around the edges

growth, and projected growth, in product / brand placement in america in usd billions

we will increasingly tell our brand
stories in video and need to weave
our brand inextricably into the frames
of the video

The third screen
photo by Drinksmachine (http://www.flickr.com/photos/drinksmachine/284991196/sizes/o/)

9.5% | 96%

the third is first

3,000
3,000
2,250 2,058
1,500
729
750
88
1 12
0
1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010
projected growth in mobile phones worldwide (in millions)

behind the numbers

with us 80% of the day

92% daily use

a personal statement

more than a phone

photo by Mike Rosales (http://www.flickr.com/photos/bullish1974/473425242/sizes/l/)

but...

90% of US users don’t want mobile marketing
72% of US users are annoyed by the idea

however they don’t mind if
it is entertaining
it informs
they are in control

if your digital strategy doesn’t have a
mobile component then you need to ask
whether you have a digital strategy. if
your digital strategy only has a mobile
componet then you need to ask
whether you have a digital strategy

Our virtual reality

we have been preparing for virtuality for some time

in our
philosophy
Jean Baudrillard (1929 - 2007)

in our literature
& films

our children brought
virtuality home

we trade in
currencies
that we never
actually hold

we immerse
ourselves in
the game

second life
introduced
the reality
of virtual
worlds to
many adults

video clip of sony home virtual world

virtual worlds were the next evolution of the internet

they came
from september 2006 to june
2008, the number of second life
members grew from 800,000 to
14,000,000

they played
during the same period the
number of simultaneous second
life users grew from 10,000 to
65,000

1,000,000 to 2,000,000
they paid
in the space of 18 months the
average value of transactions per
day on second life went from
$500,000 to between $1m and
$2m*
* Figure estimated

they profited
in may 2008 over 59,000 people
had a positive linden dollar flow,
up from 44,600 in september
2007

32

45

North America Western Europe Far East
Australasia South America Other

great virtual land rush
philips c|net adidas mercedes
bmw dell mazda microsoft reuters
sony bmg vodafone l’oreal ibm mtv

what went wrong?

limited understanding + flawed
strategy + rushed implementation
is always going to end in tears

life goes on

but is it
going anywhere...
Photo by Tom Olliver (http://www.flickr.com/photos/bigfez/360937737/sizes/o/)

google kills virtually thousands

thoughts on the future

1 virtual worlds are a
nascent technology
and may evolve with our children

webkinz
clubpenguin
zwinky
neopets
imvu
barbiegirls
gaia
habbo
redlightcenter
kaneva
second life
unique US visitors in Sept 07, in millions

2 recombinant subset of
games and social media
unlikely to escape the gravitational pull

video games match the connected
community of virtual worlds

increasingly video games are
embracing user generated
content

$34bn
industry worldwide

900
829
675
665
450 502
346
225
0
2006 2007 2008 2009
In-game ad revenue (in millions)

prediction
virtual worlds will be a subset of games

the
same applies
to social media

3 we use virtuality to
enhance our reality

society has discover a new layer to its existence

4
avatars are escaping their virtual worlds

of 23 million and counting

340
m i l l i o n
accounts

video clip from beowulf

Ray Winstone

John Malkovich Anthony Hopkins Angelina Jolie

“One of the things our grandchildren will
find quaintest about us is that we
distinguish the digital from the real, the
virtual from the real. In the future, that will
become literally impossible. The distinction
between cyberspace and that which isn’t
cyberspace is going to be unimaginable”
William Gibson

Always informed everywhere

video clip of wikitube

user opinion
augmented reality
geographic reality

building on the potential of qr tags,
iphone and android are advancing the
concept of always informed
everywhere

Reassembling the
fragmentation
photo by INTVGene (http://www.flickr.com/photos/intvgene/370973576/sizes/l/)

the very nature of internet content
is that it exists in parts

recombinant culture
fractal branding

video clip of faris yakob on recombinant culture

whether we like it or not, remix is here to stay

fractal branding embraces the
reality by building the brand
communication into the parts

video clip of the modernista Web 2.0 website

brands must exist in the parts as
much as they do in the whole

A bit like playing chess
photo by Chai Dealo (http://www.flickr.com/photos/chaidealo/706692402/sizes/o/)

photo by Ninja Poodles (http://www.flickr.com/photos/ninjapoodles/479254139/sizes/o/
The tail doesn’t wag the dog

For ongoing coverage of and commentary on brands in the digital arena
please visit the Brand Architect blog at www.collings.co.za
Thanks to Faris Yakob for his great insights and thinking which help
provide the background for the development on my fractal branding
model.
Photos are taken from Flickr under a creative commons licence. Thanks
to Oliver Wilke for permission to use the crowd shot which introduced the
sections titled “Talking to the listener”
Patrick Collings
patrick@sagacite.co.za
+27 (0)83 616 0967