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Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Another step for eBooks

E-book sales make up about 1%of the $25 billion US book publishing market. It is significantly lower across the rest of the globe. The 25% annual growth rate will probably increase significantly as a result of this move however.

One has to wonder why Amazon's share price increased by $1 on the same day that the B&N eBooks announcement was made. Was it simply that Amazon's E-Book strategy had been galvanized finally by B&N's move?



Yesterday Barnes & Noble announced that they have expanded their eBook store to 700,000 titles, Amazon has 300,000. 500,000 of these are free public domain books. Barnes & Noble's eBooks are compatible with the iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows and Mac. Amazon's eBooks are only compatible with Kindle.


When looking at the total number of books available globally, this is still just a glimmer of light compared to the total number of books published each year (UNESCO monitors both the number and type of books published per country per year). There are roughly 1,2 million book titles published each year. In order to reach the intended audience, each publication requires a surplus that will never be read.

An argument for E-Books
A large percentage of all paper books that are published are returned to the publisher. It's estimated that 2.8 million trees are cut down for books that nobody reads. This may be an exaggeration on the author's part but, let's face it, we are a race of skilled wasters. At least 5 million acres of forests are consumed by the paper industry in the Southern US. These figures are hard to find; During the period 1990–2005 deforestation took place place at a pace of about 13 million hectares (an area the size of Greece) per year globally. The forestry industry probably employs about 12 million people globally. It is a massive industry, worth much more than the book publishing and music industries together. It would be too hazardous to guess the global value of the industry today but employment in forestry declined globally by about 10% from 1990 to 2000 due to increased mechanisation. We therefore have an industry where a million people are losing their jobs every year and small countries worth of foliage are disappearing. Please let this be clear, E-Books is not the solution to global warming. eBooks will likely not make a material difference to the amount of paper produced in the next year. The point, however, is that the wheels are in motion and that electronic communication is not heading for the rocks.

The effects of the Internet on our lives
Studies have shown both the good and bad effects that online has on our lives. Interestingly, however, studies have shown that in terms of time displacement, television viewing is the most displaced medium (Kayany and Yelsma (2000) examined the effect of online media on other household
media and on family communication). In terms of information use, the Internet is increasingly displacing other forms of media.

Thursday, July 9, 2009

Cannes Advertising Awards Cyber Lion winner



The Cannes Advertising Awards Cyber Lion winner campaign achieved 99% ROI, 7 million visits in 56 days using mainly online recruitment sites and free web application service providers to promote the campaign. The campaign is now over and the actual position of "island caretaker" has been filled.

The cornerstone of this brilliant Grand Prix winner idea was to use natural search results to drive traffic to the site. "A search for "best job in the world island" achieves about 52,500,000 listings, 231,355 blogs and 43,60 news stories."

The only South African entry I could find was from DraftFCB "STAR IN THE LEMON LIGHT" for Distell Savanna so well done to them.

Gold Cannes Cyber Lions Agencies included:
OGILVY & MATHER Düsseldorf
DRAFTFCB KOBZA Vienna
CRISPIN PORTER + BOGUSKY Boulder
THE VIRAL FACTORY London
Many from BBH London

The The Young Creatives Cyber Competition was launched in 1999. The International Advertising Film Festival began in 1954. The lion of Piazza San Marcos in Venice was the inspiration for the Lion trophy. The second Festival was held in Monte Carlo and then in Cannes in 1956.

"
Inspired by the International Film Festival, which had been staged in Cannes since the late 1940s, a group of worldwide cinema screen advertising contractors (SAWA) felt that the makers of advertising films should receive similar recognition as their colleagues in the feature film industry.

In order to promote the cinema medium, SAWA established the International Advertising Film Festival. The first Festival took place in Venice in September 1954 with 187 film entries from 14 countries competing. The lion of Piazza San Marcos in Venice was the inspiration for the Lion trophy. The second Festival was held in Monte Carlo and then in Cannes in 1956.

After that, the Festival took place alternatively between Venice and Cannes. The films in the competition where split into two categories: TV and Cinema. They were judged according to technical crafts. There were, for example, categories for commercials of different lengths, live action and animation.
"

Sunday, July 5, 2009

Internet Companies and Ad Agencies in Competition?

The conversation between ad agencies and internet companies has been a strained one. In ad agency strategy sessions I have been received as a villain and a hero. In reality I am neither, but I would appreciate being treated as a business person. Many of us were subjected to Bear Stearns' ridiculous valuations. We believed that a our business could be worth a billion after two years of operation, and so did our investors. We believed we would change the way the internet worked. Those days are gone, and we've grown into business people that know one thing in today's economy: Your offering has to show tangible financial benefits to your client. The days of speculation are over, the recent economic recession has taught us this. So, when I see articles from the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival "Internet Companies and Ad Agencies Go From Old Enemies to New Friends", I am heartened. This has happened before when Omnicom Group invested in Agency.com, LiveTechnology and Razorfish at the turn of this century. Interestingly, nine years later, (WPP and Omnicom Group are arch rivals) WPP is now rumoured to be acquiring Razorfish from Microsoft. The difference in 2009, is that we have learned a lot more about the true value of the internet.

Wednesday, July 1, 2009

Cloud Computing - business is changing

How many companies, large and small, do you know that rely on the Internet? Some people may have never heard of the term "Cloud Computing". It refers to "a computation or storage offered as a service supported by a pool of distributed computing resources, also known as utility computing or grid computing". But if you have heard of the term, you probably disagree with this description. Many people think that Cloud Computing refers to online services such as SalesForce.com and Google AdWords. They are not wrong. The term has only really been around since 2007. It isn't surprising that some of the brands that appear on the search "Cloud Computing" include Sun, Salesforce.com, IBM and Amazon. These brands made the term popular or placed themselves strategically under this search. Either way, if I could invest in this term right now I would. There is a massive amount of advertising and research money being spent on the term. There are about 110 research articles on BusinessWeek's Business Exchange Cloud Computing research topic. The Cloud Computing Journal offers a glimpse into the world of defining Cloud Computing through it's attack on McKinsey and Co's controversial study.

Who will benefit from Cloud Computing and is it a fad?
No it isn't a fad, it is what the internet always promised to be. The rise and fall of the internet in late nineties and eary 2000 has not been forgotten. Some of the businesses that lost money during the crash are the same ones re-investing in SaaS (Software as a Service) and cloud computing. The interesting trend here is that Cloud Computing has stolen SaaS's meaning and the techie's are not happy. What we need to realise is that small and medium businesses don't have time to research the semantics. SME's don't have Gartner accounts. They have IT costs that are killing them. They want to pay less for IT and get more. Enter Cloud computing.



Even more interesting is that the search term Cloud Computing is most popular in India. Bangalore is the Silicon Valley of India and they are the winning Cloud Computing search city.