The downside? It take about 24 hours to print what you see here. The cost? For the desktop and office environment 3D printer, you’re looking at about $19,000 USD.

Isn’t that what lazer printers cost 10 years ago?

Online advertising is great. It built the Internet. Online advertising mimed the TV broadcast model. We can thank online ads for the freemium model.

The problem is, online advertising’s best before date is immanent. Even Google thinks so! On January 19th, 2012 Google announced a search algorithm change that will affect page ranking. By placing too many ads “above the fold” publishers risk downgrading their page rank. It’s worth adding that according to Google, “This algorithmic change noticeably affects less than 1% of searches globally.” Despite the small number,  I believe it’s time for brands to start thinking about moving away from online banner ads to more compelling engagement models.

What’s the future you ask? I believe it’s “Brand Editorial” that can be mashed, shared, interacted with, modified, and talked about by fans and audiences. Let’s discuss.

Google is now down-ranking websites that dedicate, “a large fraction of the site’s initial screen real estate to ads.” How much real estate is too much? Google won’t tell us and is not providing any analytical tools to provide the answer either. There are a few clues on Google’s Inside Search blog posting.

This algorithmic change does not affect sites who place ads above-the-fold to a normal degree, but affects sites that go much further to load the top of the page with ads to an excessive degree or that make it hard to find the actual original content on the page. This new algorithmic improvement tends to impact sites where there is only a small amount of visible content above-the-fold or relevant content is persistently pushed down by large blocks of ads. This algorithmic change noticeably affects less than 1% of searches globally.

If you get it wrong, it may take weeks for any corrections you make to be reflected in your rankings: If you decide to update your page layout, the page layout algorithm will automatically reflect the changes as we re-crawl and process enough pages from your site to assess the changes. How long that takes will depend on several factors, including the number of pages on your site and how efficiently Googlebot can crawl the content. On a typical website, it can take several weeks for Googlebot to crawl and process enough pages to reflect layout changes on the site.

The bottom line with this update is, as so many times before, for publishers to focus on creating content-rich, compelling websites if they want to use natural SEM. Anything risks a randomly-timed ranking downgrade.- Chris Trayhorn, mTHINK

A few key principals from the video worth noting include the notion that Social Media has moved from a crisis tool to an amazing media to where brands can have real conversations with customers. Marketers have reached a common understanding that audiences have moved from broadcast media to web and social spaces where two-way convos are happening. LeBrun also notes that “it’s understood now that brands are participants in the conversations taking place about their brands” and that the customer is exercising more power in shaping and influencing those brand than they do. Well, I’m not sure it’s well-understood just yet. Regardless, the new questions enterprise should be asking in the context of Social Media:

• How do I operationalize social media within the enterprise?
• What roles do I need?
• What departements do I need? What departments are affected?
• What tools do I need?
• What level of engagement do I need? Should I be listening?
• Should I be participating? When level of response and participation should I have?
• Who within the enterprise should be participating and how?
• Should every person in the organization be participating in the conversation?
• What level of thought leadership can I provide and how can I engage customers by leading the conversations and adapting?
• What business function within the enterprise should be listening and responding with customers in social spaces?
• Should Product Management, Tech Support, PR, Marketing, Research & Development teams be listening and responding?
• How much should I invest in Social Media?

Radian6 is a listening tool used to measure Social Media activity and sentiment made by customers for brands. The company is somewhat of a Canadian success story nascent in New Brunswick. In March of 2011 the company was acquired by Salesforce.com for $326 million, netting The New Brunswick Innovation Foundation $9.25 million after selling its stake.

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Marina Mann, Strategy for Digital, Social Media and Mobile

Here is Jeremiah Owyang’s Keynote Social Business Forecast: 2011 The Year of Integration

140 Corporate Social Strategists were asked how they currently handle social media within their corporation which lead to insights on how social media will be coordinated by corporations large and small into the future of this new frontier. Key points include:

- Different ways companies organize for Social Media
- Social Media spend breakdown among all SM activities and advertising
- Measurement + ROI
- How you should invest in 2011

Forty percent of Canadians accounted for 95 million orders
“About 39% of Canadians aged 16 and over used the Internet to place more than 95 million orders. This was up from 32% and the 70 million orders placed in 2007, when the survey was last conducted.  Relatively more residents of British Columbia (47%) and Alberta (45%) made an online order in 2009. Residents in British Columbia and Alberta are the most frequent online shoppers.” – Stats Canada

Security is less of an issue?!
Security concerns seem to be fading. Eight in 10 online shoppers paid directly over the Internet for some or all of their purchases. This data demonstrates a huge improvement in online payment security from PayPal’s 2008 survey which found that 51% of Canadians feel anxious about purchasing online. 40% feel anxiety due to a lack of confidence in the merchant’s security, compared to only 27% of American shoppers.

The bad news: Canadians are spending CAN dollars on US retail eCommerce sites

The fact is that large, traditional Canadian brands have backed out of eCommerce because they simply don’t have the right talent to operationalize with profitability. To name two biggies …

• Canadian Tire shut down their eCommerce online store in 2009: Canadian Tire Dodges Out of Ecommerce: Will It Bounce Back?

• The Bay shut down their eCommerce store after their director of eCommerce (with a team of two) left to join TD. Sadly, the recent relaunch of www.thebay.com is a rudimentary brand brochure, a store locator and a clumsy user experience.

A few Canadian retail eCommerce success stories are worth mentioning

• La Senza, a Montreal company has been quietly doing a great job selling panties online and shipping FREE across Canada
• Lululemon has seen some incredible growth in eCommerce: New Mantra Pays Off For Lululemon
• We also have Indigo Books but they still can’t seem to get search right. Looking for Doug Coupland turns up ZERO responses!
• Then there’s The Shopping Channel and Mountain Equipment Co-op – both have moved into Web 2.0 with product merchandising and customer reviews.

Launch, Learn and Iterate: Strategic Thought Starters for Canadian Retailers

• The unarguable truth is that Canadians want to buy from Canadian retailers for a number of reasons – mostly to save on the headache of expensive shipping and often outrageous duty fees.

• “Expect US retailers to move into Canada with greater force in the next few years to capitalize on Canadian online spending habits. Setting up a Canadian face of an existing eCommerce sites is a small investment than building from scratch. Canadian retailers must consider that online retail is still growing faster than brick-and-mortar sales. B2C eCommerce will enjoy a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of at least 10% according to eMarketer’s projections, and US retailers are well aware of the opportunity and are moving fast.”- The State of Canadian Ecommerce

• Canadian retailers are lagging behind due to anxiety of running and setting up an eCommerce webstore. However with a strategy that comes from the top, specialized talent in strategy and execution, the right data and open source tools, an eCommerce webstore can be ope operationalized internally or outsourced profitably.

Canadian Retailers: Here’s How To Get Your Webstore Right!

1. Create a Web channel line of business so your Webstore does not suffer from lack of specialized leadership and talent. While you’re at it, separate out your lead-generation from the Webstore product development activities. They are not equal.
2. Operationally, integrate Customer Care systems across all channels including Web. Your customer is not a Web customer, a call-centre customer or an in-store customer. Treat your customer as one customer. Make your Customer Care VP accountability for customer retention across channels.
3. Name a buyer for your online store to select products based on your online customer profiles. Operate with a limited product selection. You don’t need to sell all your products online! Enough said.
4. Do simple right when it comes to user experience. Don’t start out with every feature you can think of. Launch with simple features that work perfectly, like: a Blog, Search, Online Product Merchandising and Photography, Check Out, Shopping Cart + Shipping, and finally an intuitive My Account.
5. Keep your data accurate and clean. Get your product information, categorization and taxonomy right. Managing your data is the not-so-secret, quintessential sauce to a successful online retail business.
6. Do not make your IT department responsible for Webstore management and development! If you do, everything that can go wrong will go wrong. Instead, investigate and select the right eCommerce technology that will enable you to deliver the best eCommerce customer experience. Put together a manageable publishing and feature maintenance plan.
7. Think MOBILE. Whatever you create or iterate needs to work on a number of mobile platforms. Optimizing for mobile commerce or m-commerce could mean very little effort. Mobile commerce doesn’t need to be expensive.
8. Good luck and if you need help, email me: marina@marinamann.com

Follow my twitter stream of the event here.

The quality of the sessions was high, many were insightful and interesting. This year, because of the combined event, I spent a bit more time attending the TV sessions which expanded my thinking on storytelling and the cross-over from the narrative we know to the branding of the narrative that will be more and more transparent and pervasive. Given the medias’ pandemonium on the demise of TV, branded content seems to be the destiny of both the red and the blue pills.

A few sessions really stood out for me. An interview with Ricky Gervais – if you have the chance to see this man speak don’t miss it. Matt Mason‘s presentation on media and piracy was an excellent framing of the issues related to piracy. His book The Pirate’s Dilemma is a recommended read and a great continuation of what Lawrence Lessig started.

Faris Yakob: Stuff That Doesn’t Work Yet was a treat. His talk, albeit a bit silly at start, drew me in by the way he framed and articulated the gravitas (love using that word) of the media moment we’re in. Yakob lead me to Henry Jenkins, MIT Professor, media scholar.

Henry Jenkins is the author of several books including Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture and Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. His point of view of today in media is insightful. He says:

On participatory culture: A world governed by participatory culture has the potential to be much more diverse in a world controlled by a small number of media producers. As average people develop the ability to tell their stories, we’re seeing different perspectives emerge. We’re seeing different groups gain representation, we’re seeing groups challenge the dominant media images that have been constructed for their lives. And the challenge for those of us caring about social justice issues is to make sure that these tools get into the hands of those people who have been the most oppressed and most dispossessed to get their stories out and get their stories into circulation.  As we expand who has the power to tell stories, we have the potential to tell stories that grab our imagination, to touch our hearts, that come not from entertainment infrastructure but from some average citizen who’s reality has never been depicted on the screen before. And I think that’s the real excitement of our present moment of media change.

Explaining the concept of convergence media: Every story, every brand, every image, every relationship plays itself out across a maximum amount of media channels. The information system is converged, it’s integrated. We carry pieces of media with us all through the system. And that’s being shaped top down by decisions made in corporate boardrooms and bottom up by decisions made in teenagers’ bedrooms. In other words it’s shaped by the integration of the media industry so the same company may own interest in all media platforms and it’s shaped by teenagers wanting the media where they want it, how they want it, in the form they want it, when they want it. And they’re willing to take it illegally if it’s not available to them legally. Those two pressures are working together to create a much more integrated media sector than we’ve seen before.

For more on Henry Jenkins, check out the video below.

Thanks to Mark Greenspan, Amy Davies and the entire team at nextMEDIA and Banff 2010 for a great conference!

The film was directed by the collective H5, comprised of Francois Alaux, Herve de Crecy and Ludovic Houplain. It depicts events in a branded Los Angeles populated by some 2,500 contemporary and historical logos and anthropomorphic mascots. The story follows two Bibendum (Michelin tire guys) as cops who chase a terrorist, Ronald McDonald. The film ends with a zoom out from Earth to explore the branded universe.

The film is funny, witty and takes every liberty with the brands it portrays. Remarkably not a single advertiser asked to have their logo removed from the film. Could the brands have simply ignored this would-be marginal French short film that no one would see? Or, once it won the Oscar was it too late to litigate? What ever the answer, it doesn’t matter.

As a marketing and advertising professional, the film, to me, articulates a paradigm shift in brand marketing. Marketers can no longer protect how their brands are portrayed.

The 2,5000 brands in Logorama, by hook or by crook,  have no choice but to accept the customers’ commentary on the historical and emotion investment they’ve made in the brands they love and hate. In our create-it-yourself, social-media-mashup-pop universe, brand marketers are no longer in control of their brands. For good or bad the customer has appropriated the brands which permeate public space and will do with them what they please. Consumers no longer accept a top down branded message without the ability to directly comment and interact. Go forward and engage accordingly.

You can preview the short on Logorama’s website or buy it for $2 from iTunes.

HTML5 proposes to replace the need for proprietary plug-in based rich media software. No need for the user to download Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight and the like to see and interact with rich media. Rich experiences can be created and displayed to the user in HTML5!

Once adopted by all the browser clients such as Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari and the like, you’ll be able to have a Flash like experience without downloading Flash.  Wow! on very many different levels. Some believe HTML5 could kill off Flash and Silverlight.

In terms of MOBILE, currently Apple, BlackBerry Windows and Symbian don’t support plug-in based rich media software – and that includes Flash. [However, it is worth noting that many iPhone applications are mainly built in Flash.] So while Internet Explorer “won” the browser war on the PC, MOBILE browsing standards are up for grabs!

See for your self what HTML5 can do! See: Sketchpad in HTML5 http://mugtug.com/sketchpad/ and YouTube serves video in HTML5 http://youtube.com/html5/

What does Apple have to do with this? Apple has been a big supporter of HTML5 as a web standard and in so doing has banned Adobe’s Flash from all its devices.  Fewer than two months ago, Apple revealed the iPad to the world. And while the company’s highly anticipated device included a lot of features, Flash wasn’t one of them. A war of words soon erupted over the multimedia plug-in, with Flash responding to Apple and Steve Jobs ranting about Flash saying “the world is moving to HTML5.”

If you’re building your websites exclusively in Flash – stop.

While HTML5 updates a lot of things, its main focus is support for web applications. The idea is that no longer will you need to write long, horribly complex scripts or Flash plug-ins to animate your pages. Support for things like image processing, progress bars, canvases an even Ruby scripts are built in. The multimedia tags are the most compelling. No longer do you care about clients having the right plug-in installed. You use a video or audio tag and add to that a list of different formats – MP4/Theora/Flash/etc and the client will use the first one it supports. No more placeholders for “install Flashlight” and best of all, no more being held hostage to proprietary formats.

For more info on the HTML5 revolution, I recommend exploring these articles:

Behind the Adobe-Apple cold war http://bit.ly/98iHqK

Flash versus HTML5: Virgin America breaks up with Flash http://bit.ly/did8vJ

Adobe Opens Up About Apple, HTML5 and Flash [VIDEO] http://bit.ly/c339dO

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