Dazzle Ships

Inside the Great Firewall of China

In their ongoing bid to control content inside the Great Firewall of China, authorities have ingeniously turned to the internet to encourage people to grass up pornographic sites so they can then shut them down. And they've made it into a sort of online competition, perhaps unwittingly. The first person to shop a previously undiscovered porn site can win up to 10,000 Yuan (just shy of a grand). Looks like they might just be on to something, in the first day they had around 14,000 tip offs!

Bit of a case of cognitive dissonance if you ask me. The Chinese population knows that these sorts of sites are illegal and contrary to their government's view of public morality. But on the other hand the authorities are positively encouraging, indeed paying, people to go look for porn! What to do...?

More seriously the wider implications of this are very worrying. The remit of this project could easily be widened to help the government shut down those sites they feel are more broadly politically sensitive. Quite literally the digital-generation's version of the infamous 1960s Cultural Revolution, when Chinese youth were recruited to snoop on their liberal parents, with terrible consequences.

Angus

Rupert who?

Whatever the reason or intent behind Rupert Murdoch's recent anti-Google musing I wonder what the folk at Mountain View think about this in the context of their longer term ambitions? As recently demonstrated in a bit of an acquisition frenzy, they seem much more interested in the ever-nascent mobile category. They've have been on a near $1bn spending spree of late with their purchase of VOIP provider Gizmo5, and iPhone app supremo AdMob. Safe to say their focus could be on what they see as bigger things!

So what does this mean for the future? Well, in the UK Google have a friend in the shape of the government's Digital Britain project, which counts the liberalisation of radio spectrum as part of its wide ranging remit. A recent report from Ofcom shows just how this could benefit the likes of Google. The report marks the start of the exploration of technology to link up spare bits of radio spectrum "white space" across the UK, accessed by devices that can switch between the best available signal depending on a user's location.

Google would no doubt want to be part of this, and would be unlikely to follow the traditional model of charging users for network access. Rather they'd monetise through keyword advertising, whether they needed to pay the Government for a license or not. This certainly was their intention in bidding in the American 700 MHz spectrum auction last year. Although they were unsuccessful, they managed to force through legislation for the 700 MHz spectrum to be open access. Meaning telcos like Verizon could no longer block content or devices that didn't suit their ends - Google content or devices. And so Google can now go direct to the user, and not have to go via the telcos.

Mind-bending stuff! And certainly would suggest Google have bigger shrimps to barbie than News Corp...


Angus

Grasping at straws?

Rupert Murdoch is barely out of the headlines at the moment with his unrelenting drive to monetise the internet, and specifically News Corp journalism. This week, the "Murdoch doesn't get it" story is how they intend to stop their sites appearing in Google search results, as mooted in a Sky Australia interview. This would mean a range of sites could disappear from Google's search results including The Sun, The Times and the Wall Street Journal. This is not just a case of giving people the first paragraph as a teaser and then asking them to pay when they click. No, in a move reminiscent of a Ray Bradbury novel he's considering erasing every single News Corp word from Google results by removing them from the search index. Broadly speaking this is what you might call the Direct Line approach, in that he thinks that people will come direct to his sites rather than via Google. Naturally this ignores the vast number of people who have Google as their homepage, and thus navigate via it. And this also assumes that News Corp journalism is of such unique quality that people will come directly.

It's usually a fairly safe rule of thumb that you should never under-estimate Murdoch, he's repeatedly demonstrated his far-sightedness as leader of News Corp. So perhaps he knows something no-one else does about monetising the internet. But it's very hard to see what that might be! Some suggestions for the straws he might be grasping at:

• The editorial lure of his online properties are strong enough to cause people to come direct rather than via Google.
• A discerning/paying audience will mean New Corp can charge more for online ad space.
• Perhaps this is a precursor to New Corp buddying up with a rival search engine - Bing?
• The worm will turn against Google in time and other publishers will follow suit, putting News Corp ahead of the curve.
• Government intervention will limit Google's grip on the online audience - perhaps he's hoping one of his high-level political chats can leverage this?

Maybe it's a combination of these, maybe none. More broadly, in the Sky interview he doesn't sound like his usual decisive self when being pressed about online commercial strategy by a friendly Sky journalist, he really does sound like he's grasping at straws. You can almost hear the sigh of relief when the subject moves on to Obama et al.

Angus

The first trillion dollar campaign?

How would you like to have a client with a budget who's budget was over a trillion dollars (that's 12 zero's!) for a single campaign?  Think of all the fantastically creative and impactful things you could do.

Now consider that UK£1 equals 55,665,265 Zimbabwean dollars and suddenly that budget doesn't look quite so healthy.  (It's less than UK£18,000 to save you doing the math!)

The Zimbabwean, an international paper published for expats living in the UK and South Africa, recently launched a campaign using real Zimbabwean currency to encourage increased readership and highlight the plight the nation faces due to rampant hyperinflation that has rendered the Zimbabwean currency worthless. 

To deliver this message, they've utilised a combination of billboards and murals as well as handing out 'street flyers' all made out of Z$1,000,000 notes.  In fact, using the national currency was a cost saving since it was more cost efficient to use real money than to print their campaign on plain paper!  You can see more images from the campaign here.

The pictures certainly look powerful and impressive but thanks to a 55% Luxury Goods import tax placed on the newspaper making it's cover price a massive Z$58,000,000 per issue and with the average Zimbabwean monthly salary being less that Z$375,000,000, even the inventiveness and impact-fullness of this campaign is unlikely to make large shifts in the local readership. 

For all the economic doom and gloom we are facing in the UK, it pales compared to the Zimbabwe situation and I for one hope we don't get to the situation where The Daily Mail is plastering our billboards with worthless British Pound notes!

Bryan aka ThePersuader

  

What about these then...

 

 

Brands having fun and joining the party.

Stephen

Marketing Obamania

 Since Barack Obama's historic victory this week, it appears that marketing people the world over are rushing to tell us what we can learn from his campaign.  A search for 'What marketers can learn from Obama's campaign' yielded over 2 million hits)

Now, we've been talking about this for a bit anyway (even further back, on the old blog), so we're not going to re-hash it all again.

Far better that you read this piece by Al Ries of Wolff Olins on the importance of positioning in the campaign, and this piece by Seth Godin which discusses some of the bigger themes.

I think Seth says some really interesting stuff ('Motivating the committed outperforms persuading the uncommitted') and some really stupid stuff ('TV is over'), but all of it is a bit more original, and a bit more 'big picture', than the rather repititive 'It's Web 2.0 wot won it' rhetoric.

-- Toby

The guy who didn't vote

Although we've seen similar virals before for Dexter on FX , Mini, BurgerKing and others it's neat to see this sort of innovation being adopted in the US presidential race.

You can create your own version here.

Stephen

Negativity, attention spans and political advertising

It seems that, as ever, accusations of 'negative campaiging' are swirling around the Amercan election, coming to a head in last night's Presidential debate.

Despite his protestations that Obama has spent more on negative campaigning, the reality is that, as a proportion of spend,McCain's campaign has been more neagtive than Obama's.  This appears to have been a big strategic miscalculation on his part.

From a personal perspective, I applaud his standing up for Obama in the face of the ludicrous accusations some of his supporters are making.  At the same time, Palin's relentless 'Who is the real Obama?' rhetoric is clearly whipping up this hysteria (and we only met you 6 weeks ago - and the 'real Sarah Palin' seems to be pretty unimpressive).

Against this backdrop, I wanted to show this. Certainly the best political ad I've ever seen:

Not only is it positive (eventually), it gives lie to two of the big myths of modern advertising - that consumers have no attention span, and that, in an age of video, copy-writing is dead (subscription needed).

More of this, please.

-- Toby

Paris for President! Woo!

It's not often that we'll sing the praises of Paris Hilton.  But this is brilliant.

As you may or may not know, the McCain campaign in the US recently ran an ad attacking Obama, complaining that he was a lightweight celebrity, along the lines of Britney Spears or Paris Hilton :

Well, it seems that Paris, with her finely tuned antenna for publicity, is not going to take this, ahem, lying down.  She's hit back with this:

"See you at the debates, bitches"

Nice one.

-- Toby

New Ownership, New Participation

A quick footnote to some of the stuff we were writing about on the old blog, viz. the use of 'new' social media in the US Primary races (particularly Obama's campaign), and new models of consumer 'ownership', such as Slicethepie in music and Ebbsfleet United in football. 

Whilst relaxing in the rain this weekend, I noticed this article in the Sunday Times, which brings the two things together nicely, by contrasting the Obama & Clinton campaigns' approach to fundraising and activation.  As you may or may not know, the Clintons are struggling for cash - she only has $6m in the bank, compared to Obama's $38m.  And she's $10m in debt, Obama just $2m.  Expensive business, democracy.

This is all the more remarkable when you consider that Clinton is the biggest 'name' in the Democratic party.  How did this happen?

Well, we've talked before about momentum and 'Big Ideas' on the campaign trail.  When we wrote about this, Obama was on a winning streak.  He's been pegged back a bit now, but is still massively ahead in fundraising.  The answer seems to be his use of the internet to raise money and mobilise support.

Changes to campaign finance law in 2002 meant that the maximum single individual donation was limited.  In this election to $2,300.  What Obama has done is set the bar lower, at $200, and transformed his website into a social networking zone, so the message goes viral.  The key is not hundreds of big donations, but thousands of little ones.

And it's working.  Of the $31m the campaign raised in April, 94% of it came from donations of $200 or less.  In February, $45m was raised online, without Obama hosting a single 'fundraiser'.

This last point is important.  This new model not only raises more money, and involves more people in the process, but it frees up time for the candidate as well.  Everybody wins.

As Peter Leyden of the New Politics Institute says "What's amazing is that Hillary built the best campaign that has ever been done in Democratic politics on the old model - she raised more money, locked down the party stalwarts...really mastered this top-down, command and control type outfit.  But she's getting beaten by this political start-up that is essentially a totally different model of politics".

-- Toby