Has UKOM increased ad revenue?

As UKOM announce they are conducting a contract review and Nielsen launch their new hybrid methodology, surely its time for UKOM and its users to start addressing the question: are we increasing revenues?

After all, this is what an industry currency is intended to do - make planning easier and add commercial value. But then again, many traditionalists don't see UKOM at the same table as BARB and the NRS. When I was at the Media Research Group conference in Malta last year, online was the only medium that didn't get their media currency update slot. Why? Because they are not deemed to be a currency.

And in my view it isn't. I was involved in UKOM at the early stages when I was at Orange, and didn't hide the fact that I thought this process was unnecessary for a dramatically fast moving medium, not to mention the eyewatering chunk of budget my MD forced me to hand over to fund it. Other currencies are used to trade the media, UKOM is a planning currency and therefore far more difficult to prove its ROI.

Nielsen's new methodology is a good move (Comscore have been doing it for some time). It uses both panel based data and data from sites that are tagged to be recorded more accurately, and will surely help reassure UKOM and its users. After all a new supplier will add the headache of inconsistent data.

I'm not totally unsupportive. I know UKOM and its management get a tough time and they have been handed a poisoned chalice as its never going to satisfy the industry completely. As ISBA acknowledged - its here and we need to support it. That I do agree with. But lets starts reviewing its impact on the industry not just the methodology and maybe there will be a positive story to tell.

Twitter: A new user's perspective

I came to Twitter late, admittedly, for someone having worked in digital media for so long. You see, I'm no longer a digital evangelist as I needed to be back in 2000, I'm a digital realist. Consumers are the evangelists these days and those of us working in the industry need to wade through everything the digital world has to offer now to work out what is best for our clients.

So like many consumers, I never felt the need to join Twitter. So I didn't. I used Facebook for a few years and have just stopped using that (for personal use anyway - although I am starting to wonder how my primary school classmates that I haven't seen for twenty years are doing). 

My PR agency, however, suggested we started Tweeting. So I did... tentatively... feeling slightly insecure about my feeble lack of followers and wondering if anyone really wanted to hear from me that regularly.

And I started following others - individuals, companies, publications. Yes - its work, so I'm not getting hundreds of pub/holiday/friend related updates, which I would find irritating. The users I follow share really good research and opinions, so I'm reading far more stuff from a broader base of sources than I ever did before.

Twitter is a fantastic resource aggregator and this has taken me by surprise. It’s useful! I check it just as I check my favourite industry sites for news and updates.

I also have followers. Ok. Not many – yet. But despite my small group of followers so far I feel a deep obligation to become a useful resource to them too. 

Twitter has had an amazing role to play in some of the most significant world events in the last 5 years, from the US Presidential elections to the recent uprisings in the Middle East. It is a tool that in its simplicity is uniquely useful to us all. I'm a happy Tweeter.

Happy 5th Birthday Twitter!

Social media. Time for a reality check?

I deleted my Facebook account this week. Why? Because the novelty has worn off. Maybe I’m just not as interested in my friends as I should be. I have to admit none of them have noticed I’ve gone!

And I’ve been so uninspired by the brands I decided to follow that I found their too frequent updates irritating, and their pages didn’t offer me anything I wanted or needed.

Saying that, I have worked with some agencies recently that create really fabulous social media content for their clients. Maybe I just followed the wrong brands? But social media is still tactical at best rather than strategic and measures of success rarely leap beyond counting the number of followers.

A blog post by Saman Mansourpour sums this up quite well http://tinyurl.com/5txgzkk. He suggests that social media presence by brands is making life difficult for the consumers who have to wade through the rubbish to get to the content they want. So creatively it’s becoming increasingly difficult to stand out, meaning its time we took a more accountable strategic approach to meet advertisers objectives.

Tesco have taken the leap to a strategic presence on Facebook that will help support customer relations and bring unique offers to its followers. We will all be watching closely to see how this will be managed and evaluated. No doubt the followers will be there in volume, but how well customer interaction will be managed will be interesting for such a strong brand. How would posts about them hiring staff from Slovakia be dealt with for all to see?

Social media is really all about Facebook, and a bit of YouTube for the broadcastable stuff. And maybe Twitter… a bit. But with all this talk about social media it’s easy to forget that Facebook isn’t the internet. I keep seeing TV ads with the link to the brand’s Facebook page - and it concerns me. What happens if I’m not on Facebook? Do they have their own website too? Will it have the same content? Will I be rewarded for going direct to them rather than through Facebook?

Advertisers need to think about their products, their brand, and their target audience, and consider how they want their target audience to engage with that brand in the longer term.

We also really need to get to the bottom of attaching values to followers on social media. Its not enough to just be part of the conversation. Advertisers sell products. They need to know what part social media plays in this process, or if the product is already sold by the time they engage them.

The Secret of Media Diaries

I attended the Media Research Group conference in November last year and was interested to see some of the detail behind the methodology used by GfK and Ofcom for their Digital Day research. Like many of us researchers have used countless times, a media diary was deemed the most appropriate and accurate way of collecting vast amounts of behavioural data from respondents. 

I first started using diary methodologies back in 2001 when I started running the Fishbowl projects for Freeserve, later Wanadoo. We quantified how much time was spent consuming media in a typical week and were able to prove the growing impact of the internet. We used a paper diary in those days so that the research couldn't easily be discredited by having an online biased methodology. 

I used a different approach more recently when running the IAB's Mobile and the Media Day research. Rather than giving respondents a huge grid to add to at various points in the day, we sent them a well-routed survey at 6 points in the day which they could complete online. Surprisingly we had an unusually high drop out rate, despite all respondents being opted in online panellists who were well incentivised.

Would this have happened if they had been sent a grid based media diary? One that they could mindlessly tick if they forgot to complete a day's worth of data? My hypothesis is that because we pushed the survey to them and asked specific questions, it was very difficult to complete passively. Respondents were forced to think about each question whether they wanted to or not. So it’s possible that our methodology weeded out the poor quality responses.

The IPA's Touchpoints study uses PDAs to serve a flow of questions appropriate to the routing, which like my media diary will force respondents to think about their responses. A reassuring methodology for collecting such a vast amount of data, if my theory is correct.

There's more than one way to keep a diary and respondents will always want the easier option. But the ability to use routed diaries online, on mobile or on PDAs offer an opportunity to ensure data quality when collecting high volumes of data from respondents.




For more information:


IAB's Mobile & the Media Day
http://www.iabuk.net/en/1/advertisersneedtothinkmobilefirst020211.mxs

Touchpoints
http://www.ipa.co.uk/Content/TouchPoints-Site-Home 

Ofcom's Digital Day
http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/market-data-research/market-data/digital-day/ 

Local digital media offers advertisers an engaged social audience

My Dad turned 60 this month and the present I bought him was an archived original copy of the Times from the day his was born. What I really wanted to find, though was a copy of our local newspaper. News that related to places, people and events closer to home would have seemed more appropriate, somehow.

This is what local media is all about. Being someone who moved from the town I was born in to live in London, I simply don’t have the same relationship with local media that the general population does. And this is true for many of us working in media.

Research conducted by us at Connect Insight for the Newspaper Society discovered that the local media audience is a very connected, opinionated and passionate group of people. Local issues matter – a lot!  They affect people directly – crime, jobs, housing, transport links, facilities, going out. 

So this is obviously reflected in how consumers use the internet. Our digital identity is made up of the places we visit online that interest and relate to us, and locality is a big part this. Social networks and Google have been shrewd to this trend, just as local newspaper brands have had to be. There’s a strong emotional connection with local media. It has a role, a function, a part in their everyday lives. Local news brands are familiar brands they have grown up with and trust.

As you’d expect local digital brands are an extension of the newspaper brand – they enjoy the same loyalty, heritage and trust of its newspaper parent.  However, as the internet and mobile internet grows this relationship with the newspaper will evolve.

This is partly due to the fact that local digital media is used differently to newspapers.  The ability to search and personalise content plus the social, sharing and community capabilities really define online’s unique role for local media.  It is this social element and the empowerment of the audience that characterise local digital media’s unique positioning.

There are some examples of good local websites that really engage their local users. The local newspapers’ site for my own home town is Gazettelive.co.uk. Not only does it tick all the usual boxes for a news site with up to the minute rolling news, but you can also define your own definition of local and drill down by postcode. It is also home to a popular sports blogger and up to date sports news for an area passionate about football. Gone are the days when our local newsagent used to open late on a Saturday night for everyone to buy the weekly edition of the Sports Gazette supplement.

We are constantly thinking of ways of engaging audiences online. In the fragmented, personalised, often transient world that is digital media, the challenge is how to create content that users come back to frequently, talk about and interact with.

Local media is the as yet untapped sector of the digital market that can offer advertisers an audience and level of engagement that many established digital brands could only dream of.