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The Integration Initiative: Special Ops Media Gives Entertainment Marketing a Full-Service Facelift

Written on
December 20th 2006
Author
by Kiran Aditham  |
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Let’s forecast to 2007. What will be an agency’s role, and what will be the hot commodity at least in Q1?

C: Only because of where we’re at on the trajectory of this stuff, I think sites like Second Life—and I’m not just saying this to follow the pack—I think those sites in 2007 will really evolve. I think they eventually will lose a little bit of their hip factor, but we’re still in the age of the trajectory of what we’re going to be able to do in this alternative reality.

Second Life seems to have literally sprung up overnight.

C: I think you’ll see a lot of spin-offs and extrapolations on that stuff. Social networking has to change. I think it’ll move from the general to the specific, and it’s not going to be so much about “oh, this is a funny clip from somebody. Let’s send it to everybody.” I think it’s going to be much more of a personalized tool, and major companies will find out a way to work with it as much more of a distribution partner.

I remember when I went and watched the Michael Richards thing on YouTube, and all of a sudden, you’re on the CBS channel and you’re watching other Letterman clips. Versus four years ago, when there were lawsuits and saber-rattling and setting up us against them, media companies especially have been much quicker to embrace these new technologies than they have to fight them. I think that’s because of hard lessons learned. You’re going to see real evolutions of the business models of the MySpaces and the other social networking sites. I think you might eventually start to see fragmentation. You’re already seeing it where it’s going to be about mixed communities and much more like-mindedness and shared experience rather than mass audience.

Also, Google may start to be perceived as more of a software company. Their leadership positioning in the advertising space is substantial. I think they’ll continue to hold onto that position, but more and more so, Google is going to have the look and feel of a software company. I think Yahoo will come back, and make up for some of the lost market share and lost glitz factor. Right now, Google can do wrong, and Yahoo been seen as struggling. But I think [Yahoo] still has a very valuable brand, and still has real advantages in the marketplace you’ll start to see in ‘07. To piggyback on Jason’s point, I think that our love affair with video will continue, but it will evolve into something a lot more interesting because of what we’ll be able to do.

What’s your viewpoint on 2007, Jason?

J: One thing we were talking about yesterday was the idea that 2006 was the year that Internet budgets were going to go through the roof and everyone was ready to hop onboard. Relative to ‘05 and ‘04, it increased substantially, but still, you’re looking at 5-10% of total media spend. Everyone’s seen the graph where media consumption online is twenty-something percent, yet budgets are under 10% still. There’s still this huge gap, and everyone thought that 2006 was going to be the year where that gap disappeared.

One thing that I don’t think was taken into account with those predictions last year was the fact that—and we’re seeing it right now—we’ve always been dealing with middle-level marketing managers. No one was really paying real tight attention to these Internet budgets. It was more, ‘ok, we’re doing Internet marketing. Check.’ And then, somebody did care about it and cared about it passionately. Clearly, we did and we worked day and night for them. Then, everyone started making these predictions and you have senior executives, CMOs, CEOs and chairmen of companies, who are getting into the thick of it and wanting to know more about this medium and basically starting from scratch.

So, re-education took precedent in ‘06 for you guys?

I’ve seen this entire year as this educational year, where we spent more time just educating clients with a promise that with a good education, the budgets will change. So there’ve been 12 months at least of just, “Here’s why you should be spending what you’re spending, and here’s what you’re getting for these spends.” So, I think there might be little bit more of a jump in ‘07 relative to the ‘05-’06 jump in spending. I don’t know if that’s [the most] earth-shattering prediction, but it’s just pointing out this idea that we’ve dealt with. It’s been difficult because we’ve spent half our time doing theoretical education type of work. It’s not even campaign-related. It’s like “this versus this” and “what if we did this and not this” and “what does it cost to this versus that”.

It’s funny because we spent three years not having to explain our methodology. We had good results, and our clients were always happy. They just looked at the final report, and were like, “great, the product moved well” or “the movie opened well” and moved onto the next one. Now, we have to spend all this time talking about it, which has been very interesting. It’s not dissimilar than other forms of media in regards to why you buy, where you buy, what kind of impact does it have, what are the eyeballs. Right now, everyone says the Internet is the established fourth media, but everyone approaches it very differently than the other three—how many people interacted with your print ad in the New York Times, your TV spot with your TiVO in it.



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