This is a presentation on trends underpinning digital strategy that I gave a couple of times at the end of 2008. Like all my presentations, a talking head is needed for many of the slides and the videos are absent from the PDF version of the presentation. Hopefully, you will still get the general overview and thrust of the presentation.

1. 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/

2. i am a digital immigrant

3. 8
trends

4. 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

5. The flow, not the contours

6. from mainframe to desktop to internet

7. internet explorer rapidly losing ground to firefox

8. myspace sharing social networking with facebook and others

9. traditional newspapers abandoning the presses for the web

10. mainstream media battling bloggers

11. traditional blogging sharing space with micro blogging

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

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

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

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

18. it’s a big universe out there

19. 1.5bn | 0.3%
internet users and the percentage from south africa

20. 51m | 10%
internet users in africa and the percentage from south africa

21. 12m | 0.03%
active blogs and south africa’s contribution

22. 340m | 0.5%
global blog audience and percentage reading south african blogs

23. beware
the closed ecosystem

24. they may not find you as you intended
them to

25. 1
blog facebook
link app 2
digg 3
listing
blog
article
audience
rss
feed

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

27. few / much
many / little

28. if content is king, then relevant content
will rule empires

29. but, mostly, it is about
having a conversation

31. 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

32. The art of gliding

33. you are not inyou think you are
control
even when

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

35. today, everyone can be a director

36. video clip of user generated polo “commercial”

37. collection of guinness ads

38. video clip of non-sanctioned guinness ad

40. “... 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.”

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

43. invisible

44. small

45. watch it

46. increasingly need to be there

47. empower

48. engage, or not

49. integrate

50. don’t fake it

51. don’t box the demographic

52. 7 = soaring + gliding + influencing

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

54. 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/)

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

56. what sort of numbers are we talking about

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

67. embedded video clip of instructional video

69. what about the news media

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

77. 4 Guidelines

78. you have to be seen

79. integrated part of brand
communication

80. parts are greater than
the whole

81. must entertain

82. speaking of entertainment

83. branded
entertainment
the future is inside, not around the edges

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

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

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

87. 9.5% | 96%

88. the third is first

89. 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)

90. behind the numbers

91. with us 80% of the day

92. 92% daily use

93. a personal statement

94. more than a phone

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

97. but...

98. 90% of US users don’t want mobile marketing
72% of US users are annoyed by the idea

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

100. 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

101. Our virtual reality

102. we have been preparing for virtuality for some time

103. in our
philosophy
Jean Baudrillard (1929 - 2007)

104. in our literature
& films

105. our children brought
virtuality home

106. we trade in
currencies
that we never
actually hold

107. we immerse
ourselves in
the game

108. second life
introduced
the reality
of virtual
worlds to
many adults

109. video clip of sony home virtual world

110. virtual worlds were the next evolution of the internet

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

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

114. 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

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

116. 32

117. 45

118. North America Western Europe Far East
Australasia South America Other

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

121. what went wrong?

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

123. life goes on

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

125. google kills virtually thousands

126. thoughts on the future

127. 1 virtual worlds are a
nascent technology
and may evolve with our children

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

130. 2 recombinant subset of
games and social media
unlikely to escape the gravitational pull

131. video games match the connected
community of virtual worlds

132. increasingly video games are
embracing user generated
content

133. $34bn
industry worldwide

134. 900
829
675
665
450 502
346
225
0
2006 2007 2008 2009
In-game ad revenue (in millions)

135. prediction
virtual worlds will be a subset of games

136. the
same applies
to social media

137. 3 we use virtuality to
enhance our reality

138. society has discover a new layer to its existence

141. 4
avatars are escaping their virtual worlds

143. of 23 million and counting

144. 340
m i l l i o n
accounts

148. video clip from beowulf

149. Ray Winstone

150. John Malkovich Anthony Hopkins Angelina Jolie

151. “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

152. Always informed everywhere

157. video clip of wikitube

159. user opinion
augmented reality
geographic reality

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

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

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

164. recombinant culture
fractal branding

165. video clip of faris yakob on recombinant culture

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

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

168. video clip of the modernista Web 2.0 website

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

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

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

172. 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