Communities attract participants

In this new era of "conversational marketing", the measure for engagement in a community isn't the number of people logging on. Rather, it's how actively people participate in the community, according to research by Communispace.

The anaysis of participation behavior among 26,539 members of 66 private online communities, provides an initial look at member participation in communities.
The study evaluated communities along three participation metrics:

• Frequency - how often members contribute
• Volume - the number of contributions made by each member
• Bystander or "lurker" rate - what percentage of members are simply observing versus actively participating.

It seem that in a typical online forum (e.g., wiki, community, message board or blog), one percent of site visitors contribute and the other 99 percent lurk. (Source: McConnell & Huba, 2007. Citizen Marketers: When People are the Message. Chicago: Kaplan Publishing). This disparity suggests that the more intimate the setting, the more people will participate and get involved in the community.

"Big public communities may attract more eyeballs, but they may not be the answer for practitioners who are looking for deep engagement with customers" says Julie Wittes-Schlack, Communispace vice president of innovation and research.

I can believe this. A social space refelecting a the social values of an organisation and its constituency will attract like minds and participants.

An anti-Astoturfing regulation?

The Government has announced its acceptance of the recommendations of Peter Rogers' Review to set national enforcement priorities for local authority Environmental Health and Trading Standards services in full. The announcement was made in the Chancellor of the Exchequer's Budget Speech. This could be an opportunity for the Chartered Institution of Public Relations to insert an anti-Astroturfing clause into the Finance Act.

Astroturfing campaigns are described by the Institute as: the practice of falsely creating the impression of independent, popular support by means of an orchestrated and disguised public relations exercise.

The Rogers Review specifically targets activities pertinent to:

Fair trading (trade description, trade marking, mis-description, doorstep selling) ... (where) people become victims of scams.

Astroturfing is a mis description where a person or organisation deliberately sets out to mis describe the efficacy of an idea, product or service through the manipulation of public media and thereby are not an accurate description of goods or services; are a mis-description and is an, often online, activity of the nature of 'doorstep' selling or a 'scam'..

The Review detail is available here.

Specifically, an anti-Astroturfing clause could re-enforce rules to 'Ensure traders describe
goods/services accurately' and do not act to deceive.

Rogers makes the point that

Fair trading is a national enforcement priority because of the huge economic damage caused by rogue trading and mis-selling and the impact on individuals, particularly the vulnerable and elderly...

Trading Standards Professionals play an important role in maintaining a fair trading environment, a level playing field that benefits all good businesses. The way they operate is as important as the policy areas they cover in supporting the outcome of economic development.

The comment in Rogers that affects Astroturfing is where he notes:

Fair trading is an example of an area where multiple bodies are involved in delivering regulatory
objectives. Partnership in Delivery:
DTI is responsible for setting the framework of consumer and competition law which lies at
the heart of UK economic policy and within which OFT and local authority Trading Standards
Services (TSS) operate. OFT’s mission is to make markets work well for consumers. To achieve
this OFT works with partners with whom it shares common objectives. Its partnership with
TSS encompasses support to help them deliver their regulatory objectives and collaboration to
deliver shared regulatory objectives. OFT provides a national perspective and a focus that
complements the local and regional perspective and focus of TSS.

The regulatory Authority would be the Office of Fair Trading with enforcement by Trading Standards Professionals, whose chief responsibilities are fair trading, consumer protection (among others).

It would be a big feather in the cap of the CIPR to get a clause added which could be a precursor to EU wide regulation.

Talking of Europe-wide legislation, which as Retail Bulletin reminds us, demands that companies only send unsolicited sales messages via email to non-customers if they have actively opted-in to receiving them. Some 30% of companies are not implementing such policies. In practice, this means that whenever someone's details are recorded they must be asked whether they want to receive subsequent sales marketing e-messages from that company or any other third party. The legislation makes it crystal clear that simply offering someone the opportunity to opt-out of receiving unsolicited emails (or indeed pre-ticking an opt-in box) does not comply with the Directive.

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There is other legislation to protects people online. The Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000 impose requirements on businesses that sell at a distance' i.e. sell over the Internet. These regulations require that certain information, such as the identity of the business, a full description of goods or services and the costs involved in their purchase has to be provided before a contract is completed. When buying goods or services over the Internet , consumers have a cooling off' period of seven days in which they can withdraw from a contract.

With an anti-Astroturfing regulation, we could begin to see a body of law that is practical for the practice of Public Relations.

"You can't hide anything anymore" - Don Tapscott

Wired has a great article today.
There is nothing really new about it because it was covered by the CIPR Internet Commission five years ago as a principle but now Clive Thompson offers it in case study format.

The key issue now is the extent to which these ideas change organisation.

Today, at Bournemouth, we talked about theses things. We talked about how hiding from the digital rip tide is not an oprtion and embracing it must, of its nature change organisations.
Clive re-enforces the visible part but not the wholesale change that has to take place inside organisations.

It is not an option.

As Alex Iskold writes What has happened is that a load of 'Rights' are now transfered.

• The Basic Human Rights in the attention economy
• Property: You own your attention and can store it wherever you wish.
• You have CONTROL. Mobility: You can securely move your attention wherever you want, whenever you want to.
• You have the ability to TRANSFER your attention.
• Economy: You can pay attention to whomever you wish and receive value in return. Y
• our attention has WORTH.
• Transparency: You can see exactly how your attention is being used.

Newspapers to take on TV

Press Gazette tell us online spending grew by more than 41 per cent in 2006 to just over £2 billion, according to figures released by the Internet Advertising Bureau. Online advertising spending in Britain overtook national newspapers for the first time in 2006.

'Newspapers are too cheap and there are too many of them.'

That is the view of the Guardian's deputy commercial director Adam Freeman, who today rejected the notion that newspapers are under threat as a medium and said the future for his newspaper will "probably be in video".

Newspapers are "in denial" about the need to invest heavily in an online communities, Guardian Unlimited blogs editor, Kevin Anderson has warned.

Sony is the platform for a third life

The BBC reports that the PlayStation 3 console has broken UK sales records with more than 165,000 machines sold in the first two days of release, say analysts Chart Track. More than a million consoles were shipped across Europe on launch day last week with 600,000 sold.

PlayStation has graphics, immersion, the Internet, a huge following and its user base spans the generations (OK... 6 to 26 at least).

If ever there was a new communication platform games machines are top of the pops this month.

They are a PR dream channel and then there are the others like X-Box and Nintendo. Between them, they reach into over a third of all UK households.

The games genre is too important to miss. Just look at the power of World of Warcraft - people PAY every month to keep playing. Compare that with the declining numbers for corporate web sites and media web presence which are free.

perhaps it really is time to think into the X-box.

Copyright will kill economies

Charlene Li has returned to the Viacom/Google battle over copyright. It builds on her earlier comments and broader analysis including this extract:

In the end, the Internet works because it can be indexed automatically. This is what makes Google work -- it's what makes everything from RSS to Technorati work. Those indexes drive traffic. The original owners of that content need the traffic. They just don't want to give up all their rights.

But it is transparency that is the key here. If organisations are not transparent, they loose competitive advantage and if they do not facilitate transparency they loose visibility.

The actualitie of copyright is that it is broke.

The rights over intellectual properties are important in only a few instances largely to do with protecting the weak and innocent and nothing to do with patents, process and tacit knowledge.

Herceptin needs Nice If the drug company is not able to expose its medicine to the full glare of informed public opinion, then governments have to be trusted to do the job for them.

The Google issues (Belgium Newspapers, Viacom/YouTube) are only the tip of the iceberg. The web scrapping capabilities of many web widgets and the ubiquitous use of deep linking is driving new knowledge and creating new value.

I have no doubt that in the USA, corporate America will introduce significant controls over the use and distribution of copyright material. Here is a view on that from JP Rangaswami.

In the UK things are different, you do not have to register content to own the copyright... you just have to be able to prosecute a case against someone using your content because you have automatic copyright of your works.

The EU, used to the command and control continuum from Nazi, Communists, Gaulists to Blairist, has no problem with copyright and a free and liberal exchange of intellectual property and thought is simply no more needed than the preaching of a crazed cleric or manic ayatollah or.... wait for it ... thousands of bloggers, web site scrapers, deep linkers and mashers.

The problem is that without considerable dismantling of copyright as we know it today, both corporate and national economies will become less competitive.

If you are a writer and work for the BBC, why should your work be forever hidden from view because the Corporation specifically forbids deep linking (the relevant content, I reproduce here and from this page in complete contravention to the terms and conditions laid down for the use of the site).

You may not copy, reproduce, republish, download, post, broadcast, transmit, make available to the public, or otherwise use bbc.co.uk content in any way except for your own personal, non-commercial use. You also agree not to adapt, alter or create a derivative work from any bbc.co.uk content except for your own personal, non-commercial use. Any other use of bbc.co.uk content requires the prior written permission of the BBC...

Of course, I have just picked on the BBC but almost every site has similar restriction.

The reason I do so is that the BBC like most organisation contradicts itself all over the place. Here is an example:

Browser-based news readers let you catch up with your RSS feed subscriptions from any computer, whereas downloadable applications let you store them on your main computer, in the same way that you either download your e-mail using Outlook, or keep it on a web-based service like Hotmail.

OOps! They recommend that you create a derivative work by using a an RSS reader...

Henry Jenkins makes a similar point here http://wbztv.com/video/?id=27945@wbz.dayport.com

See what I mean... the whole business is nonsense and copyright as we know it today has the capability to kill off major economies and return us back through to the command and control and slavery of past generations.

There has to be a better way.

Does Google drive traffic?

Last September Google was ordered by a Belgian court to remove all French and German-speaking articles from the News results and cache of Google.be. Found in violation of copyright laws, The case was brought to court by Copiepresse, a Belgian copyright firm that represents French and German news journals, including Le Soir, La Libre Belgique and La Derniere-Heure.

Andrew Larks' pick up on what is happening to the traditional print media prompted me to look at Belgium again.

I was interested in the results of the action against Google believing that it would have a deleterious effect on the pages viewed.

I was wrong if Alexa is to be believed. Reach is mostly up (in some cases a lot) and readership is down but no more that other publications in other countries. Eventually the predictions of Doc Searle and Warren Buffet have to be examined. Attrition is eating away at the traditional publishers across the world. But is denying Google access to news pages going to hold back the digital tide or not?

The results look like this:

www.lalibre.be

The number of unique pages viewed per user per day for this site up 22%. Reach is up 152%




www.dhnet.be
The number of unique pages viewed per user per day for this site down 8%. Reach up 88%.



www.lecho.be
The number of unique pages viewed per user per day for this site down 13%. Reach up 159%.



www.lesoir.be
The number of unique pages viewed per user per day for this site down 6%. Reach down 11%

The UK's Daily Telegraph with its new Internet focused investment has page views down 8%. Reach is down 6%.




Reach for Lesoir is down 11% compared to the Telegraph fall of 6% but the remainder of the Belgium papers has soured.

What seems to be happening is this:The newspapers have to gain a huge increase in reach to maintain page views in a post Google era. But they have achived it.

This is an event worth following to see if there really are alternatives to search engine promotion for traditional web sites.

OED recognises Wiki

The word 'wiki' has officially made it into the Oxford English Dictionary.

'Wiki' began life as 'wiki wiki', a Hawaiian word meaning 'quick', but the OED has recognised the abbreviated version as "a type of web page designed so that its content can be edited by anyone who accesses it, using a simplified mark-up language".

Thanks VNUNet

Advertsing and PR need not apply

Western Mail reports that companies which have hidden behind advertising and public relations must directly engage with their customers by using new internet opportunities, one of Wales' leading internet experts warns.

Matthew Yeomans, who contributes every day to Time magazine's website, runs Custom Communication, a Cardiff-based enterprise which helps businesses grasp the potential of "social media".

The impression that PR practitioners are not getting involved in social media goes well beyond this blog then!

Use your thumb to get a grip of web stats

“As technologies like change the Internet landscape, certain measures of engagement, such as page views, are diminishing in significance for many Web properties,” said Jack Flanagan, executive vice president of comScore Media Metrix. “The introduction of these new metrics based on ‘visits’ provides an alternative for measuring user engagement that tells us how frequently visitors are actually returning to the site to view more content.”

So say Comscore.

This is useful for those PR people who take measurement and evaluation seriously and have realised that counting on all ten fingers helps.

An aside is to note that social media continues its challenge of traditional web sites among the most popular sites.

Bang bang ... both feet

The International Cricket Council has ordered YouTube to remove "hundreds" of World Cup clips claiming copyright infringement, says the Guardian.

ICC Development, the body's commercial arm, and commercial rights holder the Global Cricket Corporation, have gone after the video-sharing website to protect the rights of broadcast and sponsorship partners.

"We are here to protect the commercial broadcast rights for the ICC and GCC and there is an issue here," said Christopher Stokes, the chief executive of online rights protection agency NetResult, which represents the ICC.

"In general there is a dilemma for rights holders in that they want people to enjoy the event but also have stringent contracts with TV broadcasters and with mobile rights holders. In today's world, broadcasters buy highlights as well as live coverage and mobile rights means clips. There is an obligation to protect them.

Of course this is nuts. More YouTube content means more viewers for the TV people.
If you hide the sport of cricket, it will be hidden and who than will care.
TV is not YouTube. They are different just like online news and newspapers are different.

Killing off a channel is just daft - just like shooting yourself in both feet.

Could you believe that marketers are unethical?

Between 12% and 15% of clicks through Yahoo! search marketing ads are identified as erroneous and discarded from advertiser bills, the company has said.

eConsultancy reports.

Announcing a stepping up of its fight against click fraud, Yahoo! announced the appointment of veteran company lawyer Reggie Davis to a new vice-president of marketplace quality position.

In a role mimicking a similar senior position at rival Google, he will need a new team as well as cross-departmental efforts to improve reliability and eliminate the possibility of fraud-related legal action.

The advertsing and marketing industries are not comming out of their work in Cyberspace very well. Fraud is Fraud.

The opportunity

According to research released by eGain today, 57 percent of UK companies offer little or no web self-service, resulting in lost revenues and declining customer satisfaction. Only 17 percent of UK companies are offering their customers "visionary" or "above average" customer self-service via the web.

So here we have PR consultants falling down on the job... Just speak nicely to your client and invite their comment on how they too can enjoy the fact that 10% of all retails sales are now online.

Stick with the knitting BT.

"BT Tradespace is pitched as taking "a giant leap forward in digital marketing", encouraging users to "join a fast-growing community of buyers and sellers in your specific business area".

Business owners can garner some of the staples of Web 2.0-style Internet offerings - comments, reviews and ratings - to build customer-facing reputation...." according to e-consultancy.

Well is a couple of examples are any indication, there is some way to go. This one is an example of push communication in social space while others look like Yellow Pages.

BT has a problem with social media and always has. It is a marketing driven, push communications, scream marketing set up. It is desperate to be the final solution as witness its mad desire to sell broadband wrapped in email addresses, web gizmos and a computer stopping software bundle.

If it just did one thing well - lets say, deliver bandwidth to each home in the UK - everyone would know about it and would use it. But its would rather get into stuff that can be provided by Typepad or Blogger, MySpace(its partner in this venture) for free and better.

Turning social media into web site look alikes is trying to turn the clock back and it won't work. People use social media and web sites for different things.

Stick with the knitting BT.

Bad management is not made good with firewalls

Web 2.0 report that a survey of more than 1,000 office workers found that 42 percent of those aged between 18 and 29 discussed work-related issues on social-networking sites and blogs.

The research, carried out by polling company YouGov for content security specialists Clearswift, revealed more than a quarter of young workers spent three or more hours a week surfing blogs and sites such as MySpace and YouTube during working hours.

Nearly four in ten admitted accessing such sites "several times a day".

This is supposed to say what?

Is it that organisations are, as a result going to become more porous. Well there is no news in that. The CIPR was telling the world about that when Lionel Zetter was in short pants.

Perhaps porosity is a bad thing? Well if Employee relations are that bad, then there is little hope for thr corporate future anyway and that has nothing to do with the Internet.

Perhaps having employees aware of online information is a bad thing... well... what sort of employer is this or perhaps employees are so badly motivated about their job they go off on a YouTube hunt for the banal.

All-in-all, I don't see what all the fuss is about except that bad management is not made good with a firewall.

The teaching of PR

There is conflict between what is happening in an Internet Mediated world and PR Theory:

I would like to explore, and do not have the licence to expound that with 1.1 billion (yes - billion) observers of corporate (and personal) activity, online PR is set against a practice that self evidently undermines scream management, spin marketing, bling PR, conscienceless and conscience driven CSR and privileged lobbies. For every propagandist, there is a counter propagandist: for every view, a countervailing argument. The wisdom of crowds is at once powerful and scrutinised. Where we teach Public Affairs the Internet offers the perpetual revolution (Mao lives - Zittrain proclaims the Cultural Revolution). The influence of the Internet on so many authors we use for teaching is a problem for a module that encourages online searching. Banish the words 'market segment' (unless a segment of one), stakeholder (when everyone can see, change and influence everyone and diversity attacks Freeman's ill founded ideas) and treat 'publics' with care (because a blogger is at the nexus of a relationship cloud that can be tiny or huge and have equality of power and influence in five minutes of global fame). NOLA.com, the web affiliate of New Orleans' Times-Picayune, was awarded the Breaking News Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of Katrina. It is a blog and its content was powered by SMS. Can a PR student master (comprehend) SMS mediated blog relations? Even Porter and Grunig have modified their views in the last two years . Then, of course, the very nexus of contracts (Coase, and Easterbrook weep) is dismantled when the reality of Internet agency and porosity etch away at the Intellectual Property of 'the contract' as surely as MP3 downloads and relationships replace conversation (Sonsino) as the driving force so that organisations cease to exist as we know them – proof being three students who, asked to provide a press release as freebie to a friend with a start up web business, have asked for part equity in exchange for an online (social media) PR programme. This is an issue for all PR teaching as we know it. Die press agentry Die! Die! Die!

With so much vested in Marketing, and notably Marketing PR (whatever that is), its disintermediation before our very eyes shows the PR and Marketing Schools suffer from schizophrenia in some style. London is the world leading online advertising capital. The UK is the biggest market for online advertising; Martin Sorrell briefs the City that his empire is not dependant on Advertising and marketing agencies and keeps his share price afloat; Web sites are in slow decline, sex sites are eschewed, social media soars in exponential appeal; relationships conquer all; the brand is an RSS feed; the message is corporate values systems (British corporate value systems are scrutinised by more English speakers in China that in the UK and USA combined). Transparency, agency and porosity is the theoretical core of Web 2.0 and is nearly a decade old and still the marketers believe they have a future and, worse, encourage students to take marketing degrees.

Like many organisations, the CIPR this year ceded its online presence to the UK's PR bloggers. Many of the latter had, individually, more reach and page views that the Institute or the leading trade magazine.

Major companies and brands are in the bottom quartile for online interactive presence despite the best efforts of the likes of Martin Sorrell who are fighting off freely created wiki content for Google ranking despite a massive online budget and not a few millions spent in online advertising.

We are now past the 'does social media change behaviours' we know it does - and more measurably than advertising. We are past page views and need to measure engagement. But these are measures that we still have to learn about and teach.

Online studies undermine 'marketing by numbers' not by the way they are taught or through the content in the modules but by the evidence of the online conversation space. Projection or rejection of brand messages, brand values, semiotics and values is no longer at the disposal of the brand. At best it is available by permission. The power has shifted. Power and influence is now held by a nexus of relationships and all too often they are outside the organisation and the organisation, whether it knows it or not, is changed.

Scream management; Pap marketing; Bling PR

Scream management - Pap marketing - Bling PR is what we are taught.

It will not survive. Karl Fisch offered this:

http://www.lps.k12.co.us/schools/arapahoe/fisch/didyouknow/didyouknow.wmv

I listened to MySpace.

Information and knowledge are disintermediated.

What is success:

Conversation, innovation and listen, conversation, innovation and listen.

Listening offer values. Values are intangible. Values create relationships. Relationships with richness and reach create wealth. Wealth offers money.

New wealth is based on conversation, innovation, listening, values, relationships, reach, wealth (and money what ever that is?).
Old wealth is available through conversation, innovation, listening, values, relationships, reach (and money what ever that is?).

Pap marketing (with associated scream advertising) and Bling PR (with associated CSR) offer no values. PR and Marketing as we know it have a very short shelf life.

PR ethics - are these the right question?

There is a significant debate on the issues of PR ethics bouncing round the bloggersphere and media. Heather Yaxley has a good conversation going on about it on her blog. Tom Murphy has a take as does Leo Bottary at H&K.

I just don't think it has been thought through. We are constrained by old thinking. We are either looking in or looking out. But there is no inside or outside.

This whole debate and the issues of professional and ethical Public Relations, the survival of trades like marketing and the disintermediating effects of social media are moving corporate practices towards what some might call relationship management. There are no segments or stakeholdera snd few 'publics' in the new world.

Last year I proposed that people recognise tokens because they identify associated values and that when there are convergent values with another person or organisation empathy will create a relationship (Towards Relationship Management... 2006 JCM).

In many ways this goes beyond discourse/rhetorical, propaganda debates because they are comparatively insignificant to the nature of values and relationships.

In exposing the values (indeed, value systems) of organisations, the organisation survives because of its values or not in interactions with its wider constituency.

Is the ethical practice then to expose the values or to change them?

A purist practitioner would expose the values and be damned and would allow the organisation to be damned by its constituencies. It is a form of practice that can stand back from the consequences of foolhardy management.

On the other hand the PR manager (a person who attempts to manage the relationships between an organisation and its constituencies) would attempt to change the organisation.

If the organisation wants to use propaganda (aka marketing) the purist practitioner has an ethical duty to expose the value systems that support that approach in so far as they are values evident inside the organisation. It is an acceptable professional approach and there is no ethical issue in exposing the true nature of the organisation.

In many ways this is part of current practice with the 'bog standard' 'boilerplate' intro paragraph you see as the first par on most press releases. This exposes the organisation as having values that are propaganda (pejorative) based.
The decision to issue such a release, if taken consciously, is ethical because it exposes the value systems of the organisation. The constituent can then live with such value systems or not - Publishing is happy to do so which is fine for the publisher (and might go some way to explain away falling readership).

Dell-Hell was not about a computer it was about values and value systems of an organisation. Wal-Mart dito.

The practitioner who is not making the conscious decision between exposing values or not is, of course, not a professional practitioner and belongs in trades like marketing.

To those who would argue that 'spinning' and 'putting the best face' are unethical practices I would argue that there is now a discursive inevitability that these practices will be exposed by the online conversation in due course.

This inevitability may be a challenge from any quarter. It could be some comment in a blog or it could become the disintermediation of a whole industry.

The assumption that 'it can be hard for the public to evaluate viewpoints and come to a reasoned conclusion' is unreasonable (more marketing speak). Who is 'the public'? Who are we to judge? If we believe such ideas we doubt the very foundation of democracy.

The attraction of values that represent tokens is hugely powerful and more potent than scream marketing can guess at. Did Tesco and Morrisons do enough to allay fears of polluted petrol with its advertising campaign this week? Yes they did. They paid through the nose to pay for the repairs to customer's cars, but, a week after the problem arose, what have they yet to do to assure their constituencies that the values of supermarketing and their constituencies have common resonance. The backlash will not come where the petrol is cheap. People are not daft. It can now come from anywhere and the real damage is that Tesco and Morrisons have no way of knowing where or when it will happen. Reputation in crisis is not knowing where the damage will be manifest.


There is no dichotomy for the ethical practitioner exposing corporate (institutional) values. The values are reflected in the people who can live with such value systems and killing the messenger is not what the PR industry should be doing. Indeed, our inability to be purist or manager is giving rise to a massive 'Citizen Public Relations' (CPR) sector which is replacing much of PR practice.

Our role as business managers has some way to go if we are to be empowered to change the very nature (and values) of organisations.
We are not forgiven and have a reputation in crisis.


Picture: Charnine
Charnine.com features information on surrealist artist Charnine

12 Themes on the 'User Revolution'

Piper Jaffray & Co. Internet Media and Marketing research team today published an in-depth, comprehensive research report titled, "The User Revolution.


There are 12 key themes discussed in "The User Revolution" report:
1. Global online advertising revenue to reach $81.1 billion by 2011.
2. Communitainment: Internet has increasingly become a principal medium
for community, communication and entertainment -- three areas that
have collided and are impacting each other's growth -- generating a
new type of activity: communitainment. Communitainment is taking time
away from other, traditional, types of content consumption on the
Internet.
3. Usites -- The increasing popular category of user generated sites,
which we are calling Usites, are driving traffic away from other
destinations and pose a challenge to the advertisers and publishers.
4. The Internet is now a mainstream medium: The web is the leading
medium at work and the second leading medium at home behind
television.
5. Internet usage patterns are changing, favoring Usites,
communitainment sites, search, and away from traditional portals.
6. User Generated Brands. The consumers are taking control of content
consumption and branding.
7. Media Fragmentation: Advertisers increasingly will need to buy more
inventory, from nearly all types of media, especially the Internet,
to have the desired impact.
8. The Golden Search: search has become the new portal.
9. Google's dominance is likely to expand, partly fueled by a wide
variety of non-search related products that create a virtuous cycle
of brand affinity for Google.
10. Video ads will be the driver of the next major growth in brand
advertising and getting additional dollars shifted from traditional
media to online.
11. Ad networks are experiencing increased demand due to increasing
Internet fragmentation, desire for more targeted inventory,
increasing usage of networks for branding and increased site
visibility.
12. Agencies are rapidly evolving into more sophisticated,
technology-savvy entities that combine best of breed offerings.

Delete Ads, insert relationships.