We’re loving Spotify, the new streaming music service, which launched yesterday. They’ve signed deals with most of the majors, including Universal, Sony BMG, EMI, Warner, Merlin, The Orchard and Bonnier Amigo.

After downloading a very light player (similar to iTunes, but with better functionality) you are free to search, listen and share just about anything you want from an immense library.

There is a free version, which is ad funded, or you can subscribe to an ad free version for £9.99/month. We’re very happy with the free version at the moment, and all ads so far have been well targeted and relatively infrequent (approx every 3 tracks or so).

It seems like a great model, and the interface/ functionality is so well executed and intuitive, it begs the question, why didn’t anyone do this sooner? Could this finally be the future music distribution and monetisation model the industry’s been waiting for?

Spotify is currently on a phased roll-out program, so you’ll need to wait to be invited to join, but if you ask us nicely we might have some of our free invitations left.

All we need now is a Spotify iPhone application, so we can bypass the iTunes store all together, although we doubt that is going to happen anytime soon.

We went over to the Bloomsbury Ballroom on Thursday for the launch of Platform A, the new name for the collective assets of the media-owner-formally-known-as-AOL.

Platform A is a smart idea.

It’s an integrated sell across the AOL portal, Tacoda, Advertising.com, Quigo, Buy.at, Third Screen and at some point Bebo (although Yahoo! are still selling this in the UK) allowing them to answer any brief, although the big area they will still miss out on is search as they use Google for their listings.  All the major digital media owners are moving towards this model so similar integration moves from Yahoo!, MSN and Google will be in the pipelines and it will be interesting to see if they rebrand and re-engineer their sales outfits in the way that this group has.

One really interesting part of this offering from the buy side will be the ability to construct a campaign over all these properties that builds shared data sets on consumers which can be used across all network properties e.g. build a pool of interested consumers on AOL and then re-target them on the Ad.com network.  This is a really interesting direction for the industry and whilst there will be a big learning curve for the sales force of what is possible, there will one of equal size for media buyers.

First to market with this is a great place to be however.

Oliver Luft of the Guardian blogged a nice piece today, summarising comments made by Stefano Maruzzi of CondeNet International at the AOP conference yesterday, in London.

Maruzzi, President of the digital arm of CondeNast, spoke of the challenges of attuning an established international company that publishes glossy magazines to the digital world.

The transformation of content sourcing, production and editorial functions into an agile, cross platform, trans title resource is a mammoth challenge indeed, but one which CondeNet are tackling head on in a bid to ensure they connect with the ‘iPod generation’

It is mentioned that close to 50% of their operating costs are focussed on content production.  This is reason enough to necessitate that content delievering the highest value return possible. There are now real opportunities for content owners to work their assets much harder, expanding beyond the realms of their own titles, to essentially use their content as advertising.

There is nothing particularly groundbreaking in the concept of ‘taking the mountain to muhammed’, but the fact is that it’s now easier and cheaper than ever to achieve. The level of inter-connectivity and accessibility to free digital distribution channels means you can now pump out tasty snippets of teaser content to thousands of potential new readers, in the places where they hang out online, very quickly and very cheaply.

The winners in this new world will be the content owners that can efficiently pull these readers back into their own domains and monetise through smart ad funding.

Infectious have been appointed by games developer Cybersports, as lead digital agency on the soon to be released Football Superstars MMOG. Football Superstars (currently in Beta test phase) is billed as the world’s first Virtual Football World. It’s essentially a multi-player online game set in a virtual world, featuring thousands of human players who re-create themselves online as footballers.

Players can play their way from three-a-side up to full 11-a-side matches, gaining new attributes and skills in order to specialise in their chosen playing position.

Off the pitch, players can socialise in bars, clubs and restaurants. They can also visit virtual stores where they can buy the latest equipment and designer clothes.

Players can also train in gyms and on training pitches to enhance their skills, or interact with the paparazzi in a bid to boost their fame and status and gain access to the most exclusive clubs and venues.

Andy Cocker, Managing Partner at Infectious said “We heard about the games development, and immediately wanted to be involved. It’s a hugely exciting and innovative project on so many levels, and we are thrilled that Cybersports have chosen Infectious to help launch such a highly anticipated release.”

Martin Kelly, Co-founder and managing partner at Infectious continues - “It’s exciting to be working on such an interesting and diverse brief. We’ll be promoting Football Superstars across the digital media landscape in its broadest sense, using ‘traditional’ digital channels, integrated with a strong social media core, that makes the most of the games fabulous content assets.”

Phil Booker, Sales and Marketing Director, Cybersports Ltd, commented - “Infectious were the obvious choice for us. They stood out from the rest in their understanding and experience of both established and innovative digital marketing techniques. We very much look forward to working with them”

The Football Superstars virtual world is already attracting plenty of attention from advertisers keen to see their brands and products represented in the game. Puma have already signed a deal that will see their Carnaby Street London concept store replicated in the game, where players will be able to buy virtual Puma gear, including the v1.08 Speed Boots, which allow players to run faster. Further high profile deals are expected to follow.

Cocker, commenting on the first few months of business at the agency, said “we’ve been overwhelmed by the interest and support we’ve attracted since launch. The team and business is growing quickly, and we look forward to making further announcements very soon.”

Sometimes it takes something big to take technology to a tipping point. In this instance you can insert the Olympics and online video into that equation. The BBC have released some statistics on their coverage and the numbers are BIG. From 2.5m streams in Athens, the Beijing games saw a 16 fold increase up to 40m streams and still counting (the last time I watched the Olympics online it involved penguin tossing, I’m not sure that counts however). This averages out at 3m streams per day with a peak of 5.5m, a huge number and I’m guessing that demographically this will be a much older audience than your typical You Tube user.

Broadband has made this shift in habit possible and with the content now there, video consumption is growing rapidly. With this comes a new headache for video media owners of what are the best ad formats to use in order to monetize the stuff. The most established and high volume video media owner, YouTube, has been scratching it’s head for some time now over an uninspiring selection of pre-rolls, ad breaks and overlays with no concrete answers coming to the fore as yet as to the way forward. As seems to be a fairly common theme, the closer the answer seems to be in mimicking formats from other media, the further away from the actual answer it is.

Some of the most interesting innovation in the sector seems to be coming from video ad format specialists who free from the headache of content regulation and legality are concentrating on producing formats which have been created with online viewing and more importantly interactivity as a starting point rather than the interruptive and passively viewed TV model. Video Egg has are pioneering formats that sit over video and allow users to access other content without leaving the site they are on whilst Coull are designing formats that allow users to click and find out more information on individual products or characters within that video, the benefit to sectors such as retail is obvious.

So with the eyeballs firmly here, the next challenge for media owners, agencies and brands is going to be how we interact with and engage consumers using advertising in this environment and it’s the online video specialists that are coming up with the most interesting answers so far.

Content is a funny thing.

I’ve been schooled to believe that it is King-of-all-it-surveys and yet for content owners it seems to be a real headache making money off the stuff within the digital space.  The figures don’t seem to lie either as all of the dot coms that have sold or are valued at huge amounts don’t actually dirty their hands in the content business.  They search it (Google), aggregate it (YouTube), rate it (Digg), bookmark it (Delicious), let you publish it (Wordpress), let your friends see it (Facebook), let your friends see that you’ve seen it and make them look at it too (Friendfeed) - in fact everything but make it themselves.  And on the flip side we see

content businesses in digital struggling hugely, to sample a few, falling revenues at Trinity Mirror in the UK and the New York Times close to being downgraded to junk stock in the US.  The bit that doesn’t quite stack up is that none of those cash cows in the former breath would do so well without those businesses in the latter as without content they are nothing.  In fact so obsessed with this disconnect between content and money are the Guardian, they even bought a site that tells you how to make money from the stuff, paidcontent.org (is there something we should know about ad revenues?).

The reality is that it’s not the content business that’s broken, it’s the sometimes outdated revenue models that sits around it.  Ad revenues don’t stack up for most content owners from print and TV in digital as either the demand or CPM’s just aren’t there yet that they get from their offline businesses.  The point is that digital is not press and it’s not TV, so 25×4’s and 30 second breaks don’t work, why would they?  Those that are making serious revenues from content are those that find smart ways of targeting advertising based on content to increase the yield of page impressions (Google in Search, Wunderloop in behavioural targeting)  or those that sell something off the back of that content (MoneySupermarket for instance and potentially Coull for buying items direct from video content?).

So content owners breathe a collective sigh of relief, your content is still the bees knees, however the net must be cast a bit more widely in terms of how you approach monetising that content forgetting old ways of doing things and seeing what technology has to offer your business above and beyond what you’ve done before.

Data seems to be the word of the moment. Evil companies using our data is terrible everyone says, Phorm and Facebook Beacon are an invasion of our privacy and have faced a barrage of negative press as a result. But in a different situation we think using data to target advertising to us is great. Google are the single largest media owner in the UK (in any medium) based on matching ads to the search terms we’ve inputted. Granted this is more overt targeting of advertising based on data we surrender but dig a little deeper and Google Adsense seems to slip under the privacy radar, targeting ads based upon the text of the emails within your Gmail account and nobody complains.

Perhaps once technology is understood and the brands involved such as Phorm are familiar then the outcry will die down. The fact is that none of the brands that are involved break the law in any way, as long as behavioural data is anonymous then its legal (Doubleclick put this to the test in 2002 and lost). Behavioural targeting is the advertisers holy grail, being able to serve consumers ads based upon tangible data that we know about them and it’s fast becoming a reality. All media owners are seeing it as a way of increasing the price they can charge for their advertising so Yahoo, AOL, The Guardian, The Times etc are all implementing this technology to some extent. One step further and those companies that provide the technology such as Doubleclick (Google), Atlas (Microsoft), Tacoda (AOL) and Blue Lithium (Yahoo!) have been snapped up for huge sums of money as the big players stake their claim for future revenues and make this particular future a fait accompli as a result.

What is interesting is where this goes next for the consumer. Steve Ballmer was interviewed by the Washinton Post (here) in June saying the next battle for users will be played out over privacy policies. As we become more savvy about internet companies using the data that we surrender to them to target advertising then we will start to realise there is a value attached to it. He suggests in the future companies will actually pay consumers for their data in the future.

The outcome? All roads lead to a behaviourally targeted future where ads are targeted to us based on behaviour we’ve displayed and are probably for something we actually want (is that such a bad thing?). However what must happen is that data is knowingly surrendered when it is used, this is something both companies and governments must think about in their policies as technology has been moving much faster than consumers can keep up with.

Following yesterdays post, Google last night as expected, announced the release of Ad Planner: A pretty comprehensive digital media planning tool for media buyers.

Key observations, based on the limited screen shots and reports so far:

• It’s free.
• It gives some really useful and interesting insights to media planners on where to find audience.
• This is a major blow to Comscore and Nielsen who currently provide similar subscription based systems. (Comscore stock dropped 22.5% on the announcement)
• Google are being deliberately vague on the data sources behind the interface - There is speculation that Googles’ widely distributed toolbar is one source of user browsing behavioural data. Ironically, there are suggestions that Google is also buying Comscore data to contribute to the multi source data pool.
• It links directly to Doublclicks MediaVisor product, which provides a direct link to publishers and the DFA ad-serving platform for automatic ad trafficking etc.
• Initial feedback from the agency community is mixed.

Our view is that it looks like a smart tool, which will be very attractive to smaller and mid sized agencies, because of the price. However, there is growing concern over the increasing hold it will give Google on the digital media planning and buying value chain. As one NY blogger so eloquently put it…”is this not a case of the wolf guarding the hen-house?’

We’ve just been test driving Googles new ‘Trends for Websites‘ toolkit. Up until the end of last week, Google Trends allowed free access to search query data to analyse trends over time. This is useful for identifying and tracking the ’search’ buzz around brands and products, but of limited use to media planners on it’s own.

Last Friday, however, an update was announced to the service. Trends for Websites gives users access to (modelled) site traffic data. At the moment the key metric is unique users per day, with related data on which other sites those users visited, and the related terms they searched for. Suddenly this data starts to become much more valuable to a media planner.

The data behind the service is multi sourced and (in Googles own words) ‘includes aggregated Google search data, aggregated opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data, opt-in consumer panel data, and other third-party market research. The data is aggregated over millions of users, powered by computer algorithms, and doesn’t contain personally identifiable information’.

The one thing it isn’t, is totally accurate. In the same way the Comscore and Nielsen data use panel data to estimate site traffic, so too does the Google tool, albeit fused with other data.

Interestingly, Comscore reports 3.6m daily unique visitors to www.bbc.co.uk, whilst Google trends for Websites reports c. 2.0m. Quite a big difference, although It’s early days, and no doubt, as Googles data becomes richer and deeper, the stats and trends it reports will become more accurate.

The most significant trend here however is not the site stats themselves, but the statement of intent that this move signals. The release of this tool-set sends a clear signal to the market of Googles intention to further develop (free) tools to aid media planning and buying across the wider web, not just sites within their Adsense network. As these tools become more sophisticated and accurate, and become integrated with Doubleclicks ad-exchange and ad-serving platform, it gives Google access to a revenue stream from the wider digital display market, outside of search.

The move also spells trouble for services such as Hitwise, Comscore, Nielsen who between them provide a range of similar services and charge handsomely for them. Is this the fall of yet another ‘barrier to entry’ in the digital media agency market?

According to a number of sources, including Silcon Valley Insider, Google will today (24th June) announce an enhanced, PRO version of this tool (possibly called AdPlanner) at the Advertising Research Foundation conference in New York…. We’re waiting with baited breath.

How long before this tool-set starts to cover TV, Print, Radio and Outdoor? Now that’s a future blog post all of it’s own.

We’ve been thinking about social media a lot recently for various projects and had quite a lively debate this week on the Mediatel Social Media panel. The first thing that strikes me is that nobody really can clearly define what it is, the stock definition is often ‘…erm, Facebook?’ In fact when the panel was asked what it was, everyone looked at each other and stroked their chin in a that-was-the-question-I-was-dreading sort of way. Social Media is an ambiguous term but broadly speaking it is a set of technologies and sites that allow consumers to both create, share and feedback on content. So on one level this could be something like a blog, or another an application like MSN Messenger that allows us to communicate in a different way, or a site like Last FM which allows us to share our music tastes and find similar artists to those we like and similar listeners to us.

But the reality of all this technology is that it’s just a conduit for what really always has been king and still is: content. Maybe it’s music, or maybe it’s our friends social life but what social media is allowing is new ways to access, categorise and distribute content we like.

For media agencies, this creates an uncomfortable situation as this isn’t media as we’ve known it in the past. As utilities, there is very little interest in advertising in these environment and the well trodden path of ‘buying space’ that we’re used to in other media just doesn’t work. The very best examples of brands using social media have been those that have understood the difference between media that’s consumed and media that is a utility. O2’s ongoing work with Facebook is a great example as was the Talk to Frank Bot on MSN Messenger as was Radio 1’s Music Cubes with My Space. All three of these campaigns were based upon brands creating a utility themselves rather than buying some space. Media agencies look after huge budgets and have the relationships with these media owners so they are often the first port of call for a client brief when the subject comes up. But to get things right here it will take a shift in mentality from buying to building and this is a transition which the media industry is currently really struggling with.

One of the reasons we started Infectious was to build an agency with a new structure and a new approach that understands and can take advantage of these profound changes in behaviour. Tapping into social media is one element of our planning and executional offering, whether that be developing a widget with our partners at one end of the scale or buying some space at the other. However most importantly, we approach this environment with more than a one-size-fits-all approach.