manuel FAISCO

[FullSIX Lisbon]

Mobile Ads: A Lesson From Japan

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Two weeks ago I was fortunate enough to attend Web2.0 Expo Europe 2008 in Berlin. There, I met Gen Miyazawa and Ren Ando, of Cirius Technologies, Inc. – a thriving location-based mobile advertising company based in Tokyo. I attended their presentation, “Location-based Mobile Ad: A Lesson From Japan” which had a huge impact on me. Why? Because living in a western, ultra-connected and digital world, we tend to assume we are the real pioneers. Well… the truth is after Gen and Ren’s lesson, I’ll always look East before assuming anything of the sort.

The picture they presented sounded like a forecast of the Future in 10 years time… However it is Japan’s reality, right now. So here are the figures:

- 90% of the subscribers use the mobile web;
- 90% will be on 3G by the end 2008;
- At the Present, almost 1/2 are GPS enabled phones;
- The Mobile commerce market has hit 10B USD*

It is predictable that TV watching (w/ digital TV tuner) and video sharing will soon become a top mobile entertainment. You Tube on mobile and Nico Nico Video Sharing are already becoming a clear trend.

IC wallets are being integrated with mobile phones by default. This mobile electronic payment method already has 28.5 million subscribers (as of Mar 31, 2008) and is accepted in Public transportations, supermarkets and vending machines.

So why did this market grow so rapidly in Japan?
A combination of broad coverage of 3G network, flat-rate data plans and a bigger influence of the operators upon mobile ecosystem than in GSM markets did the trick. Read More »

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3 November 2008

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A new breed of data is born

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People who deal with Internet stats on a daily basis should be realizing by now they need to find out ways of squeezing the juice out of all the tag-related qualitative data all over the web.

Sure quantitative data is ok, but when it’s about how people feel about your brand and service, corporate executives are always on their toes. We’re talking about very important qualitative data here.

Folksonomy shows no signs of slowing down, and people’s behavior has changed. They are tagging as they surf the web, just tagging along the way. And amazing things happen when a lot of people tag the same Internet content. You get the “collective perception” of things, which is a form of “collective intelligence”.

It’s time to pick up those Sociology, Psychology and Linguistics books and experiment with this brave new world of “organic data”. So don’t be shy, release the Internet shrink in you!

Here are some great examples of fun ways to play with this qualitative data:

- Top 10 tags for www.mtv.com on Delicious, saved 1558 times;
- 305 notes of people who have bothered to write about the MTV website in Delicious;
- Paste any text into Wordle and get beautiful visual tag clouds of whatever you want. Paste the presidencial candidates’ speeches for example, and compare the results side by side;
- But things can get even more interesting… like when you ask people to write the first word they think of when you show them a brand logo. Believe me, it’s kind of addictive. That’s what Brand Tags asks of you, and so far they’ve gathered 1.2M tags about brands. Just dive into their database and you’re in for a treat. Don’t miss out on Battle Mode, where two brands go mano a mano on a match for the user’s prefference. Here’s the current ranking.

The image above is a tag cloud generated by Wordle of this very post.

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10 October 2008

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The beginning of something new for advertising?

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Yep, it’s Facebook time… again! Facebook’s been getting a lot of coverage from us… even though I think they shouldn’t have messed with it – personally I liked the old one better.

But this short post isn’t about those changes; it’s about changes in advertising! Did you notice that now you can rate ads on Facebook? Thumbs up or thumbs down? And on top of that, you can choose the reasons why you liked/disliked that particular ad…

Well, this is a first timer for me and I think this is very fair. If you can rate just about anything on the web nowadays, why shouldn’t users be able to rate the ads that target them?

The question is: what will Facebook do with user feedback? Will it charge advertisers more for unappreciated ads? Or will it use this intelligence for upgrading its targeting capabilities, besides its demographic and interests segmentation criteria?

Your opinion is most welcome.

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18 September 2008

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Gimme more pork and beans

Weezer’s video of the song “Pork and Beans” is all about Virality. And it is viral itself, because it gathers just about every YouTube superstar out there and if you are one of the millions of people who saw these blockbusters, you will find it funny. You can download the video here if you’d like.

Go stupid, go crazy seems to be the moto. This is the kind of stuff that either impresses us or makes us laugh, not done with actors but with real people. The formula seems to work with either spontaneous or enacted videos.

Viral videos are a consequence of the liberation of the web, which began with the creation of free platforms that allowed the mass creation of written, composed, filmed, photographed work. Today’s users spend millions of hours viewing stuff other people uploaded. Maybe it is just a matter of human nature. We like to laugh at crazy stuff, at the ridicule. We even laugh at our own mistakes and life’s bloopers.

This is an ever growing spiral of user-generated information, and it’s getting better. Users are finally seeing what they really want and the one way information flux era is behind us.

And this is helping the Web in becoming more like us and a better place to hang around.

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5 September 2008

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“Small” improvements, great opportunities

New features in YouTube and Flickr enhance user experience and open new possibilities for advertisers.

In YouTube, for instance, now we can create stories with multiple plot choices, just like Samsung Canada did in a brilliant way (see above clip). Hats off for them for pioneering!

In Flickr, adding notes to pictures is pretty easy, and now advertisers can scan photo streams in search of images featuring their products, thus enhancing product placement and providing info on those products, prices and links to specific company website areas about that specific product, one step away from conversion!

So, it’s time to rewrite the chapter on online advertising. Now we all can explore the possibility of having still or filmed interactive catalogs on at least these two major Internet properties.

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27 August 2008

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