Microsoft Hohm Beta Launch

TodayMicrosoft have just launched a new site called Microsoft Hohm.

http://www.microsoft-hohm.com

The site will let you track your energy consumption in the home either by entering data manually or by allowing it access to a smart meter.

Smart meters in the UK are due to be rolled out between 2012 and 2020 and will potentially revolutionise the energy market.

From this point onward you will have the ability to track all of the power consumption in your home. The smart meters will allow you not only to look at the overall power consumption but in some cases could even let you monitor this by room and all the way down to the appliance. All very clever.

This could be technology that starts major change in consumer behaviour.

Both Google and Microsoft have there eyes set on this opportunity to collect more data and it will be interesting to see how it all gets used should the power companies or consumer decide to go down this route of allowing it to be shared.

Microsoft has already laid its cards on the table and will look to use this data to sell additional marketing ads. Google is yet to declare a position but with the ability to generate so much insight on the consumer I am sure it will be a hard temptation to resist.

Interestingly enough as I write this at 4.30pm on the 7th June it looks like the site is down.
HTTP 500 Internal Server Error

I hope that does not mean that they have not paid the electric bill and the servers have been switched off !

Filed under: Creative, Marketing, Opinion, Technology, Energy, Environmental, Green, Green Power, Microsoft Hohm, Power Meters, Smart Meters

IFAW UK – “World Without Gorillas” PSA

more about “IFAW UK – “World Without Gorillas” PSA“, posted with vodpod

Filed under: Creative, Marketing, Interactive

Is A Big Idea Enough?

Is a great creative idea still great if it adds no value?

Late last year (December 2007) in an FT article Cadbury’s suggested that the “Gorilla ad” had played a major part in helping to raise its sales in Dairy Milk Chocolate.

TNS recently did some work for Marketing Magazine that looked at the biggest brands in the UK by sales.

One of the most interesting facts that came out of it was, that although Dairy Milk had a huge profile and PR success with the award winning Gorilla advert, they actually lost market share, posting growth results below the market rate of 2%. Galaxy on the other hand grew 12%!

Jan Jesenovec from TNS said that “advertising will not significantly increase your sales…it simply reinforces the positions of big brands”. I think the Gorilla ad is a great demonstration of this at work.

I personally loved the Gorilla ad. I thought it was bold, different, unexpected and had great stand out but I am not that surprised it seems to have had zero impact on sales.

Just like many others, I stood around the water cooler at work talking about it and emailed my friends the You Tube video link. Did it make me buy any more Dairy Milk…well errr no. I thought it was great entertainment but it did not make me feel like buying a chocolate bar, let alone Dairy Milk. What it did do, like many others, was make me want to talk about the piece itself – very much like a great bit of artistic work, a great film or a good book.

In doing so, the ad became more about the Gorilla than the brand or the chocolate bar. My emotional connection was with how “clever” the ad was and not with what it was ultimatly looking to sell me (that is unless Cadbury’s is moving into the entertainment business and out of the chocolate one).

When you look at Galaxy on the other hand, it is aimed squarley at women and plays on the soft seduction of chocolate. The emotional connection is clearly seductive in the way you visually enjoy the emotional sensation of the chocolate. They are clear in what they are saying to you and it’s all around the chocolate experience.

Fundamentally, it seems that the Cadbury’s work by Fallon failed to generate sales. So was the Gorilla ad worthy of “Top Dog” at Cannes, or some of the other awards it has picked up in the last few months? In my opinion I don’t think it was. Great advertising creative is there to serve a purpose and, more often than not, that is to generate revenue in one form or another. If you don’t do that, you sort of miss the main underlying objective of the brief. In this mad world we live in, at the moment making sure that the work delivers to the bottom line, is going to be even more important and something that many creatives are going to need to pay more attention to.

CMO’s of today are measured on their financial results that positively hit the bottom line, not on the number of trophies and paper weights they have on their desks. Ultimately, if they don’t deliver, then fantastic creative awards are just extra stuff to pack in their box as they get their P45.

The best creative is about results, not awards and a great creative idea has to first of all deliver the former.

Filed under: Creative, Marketing, Cadbury's, Marketing

Ohhhoooo It’s Big!

Every day I am more amazed by what is going on in the digital world and how it’s changing.

In 10 years we have manged to create the most complex “thing” humans have ever built - which in that short but complex time has never broken down.

It spans the world, has millions of users, billions of connections, trillions of bits of information and almost all of the world depends on it for commerce, communication, entertainment etc. In my opinion it is without a doubt the most important and influential development in our history.

What I find even more incredible is that the majority of what we have built we can’t easily find and we have huge amounts of “Dark Data” lurking out there un-indexed. The Internet is growing at a stupendous rate as people become more accustomed to applications like Flickr, You Tube, Facebook, Myspace etc more data and information is being added into the system.

In October 2005 Eric Schmidt from Google said that, “…a recent report shows that there is about 5 million terabytes of information in the world”. Google at that time had only managed to index around 170 terabytes. If Google was to index the remaining 3.3 terabytes at the same rate it would take about 300 years, and that’s assuming that no one added any more to it.  Since then the amount of information in the world has continued to grow exponentially. This massive increase is raising some interesting problems, questions and opportunities about who and how we index all of that data if it’s going to be of any use.

There are also questions being asked about if this “unbreakable system” we have, can actually cope with so much data and there is a risk that there will be so much that it generates something being coined as “The Exaflood” (a film title there i think). This is where there is so much data it clogs the whole system and it grinds to a halt on a global scale. Is this possible? I think that you only have to look at what happens to the UK connection speeds when the US comes online to get the answer.

In 2006 International Data Corp estimated that we would generate about 160 Exabytes of new data that year. That was 2 years ago, since then many more video sites have come online, along with growing economies like China and India. (India’s film industry is also bigger than Hollywood’s so there is plenty to go at film wise in terms of getting it online).

Now when I first heard the term Exabyte it did not mean that much to me so let me explain.

One exabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes (dependant on whether you are sticking to decimal – click the link earlier, to see what I mean but it’s a big number).

If you were to take that 1 Exabyte of data and turn it into DVD quality video footage then it would take 50,000 years to watch – and that’s only 1 Exabyte!

Ironically (and not helping the problem) this video from You Tube gives you a great explanation of the potential of an Exaflood

What is obvious to me, is that being able to make sense of all of the data online, from a business and consumer stand point, is going to be critical and we need to find ways to simplify it all.

Filed under: Creative, Opinion, Dark Data, data, Exaflood