Lucidity

Our discussion with Tom Smith, Head of Consumer Futures (EMEA) at Universal McCann, continued. Read part I here.

The Wave 3 document comes out in favour of widgets and their potential importance to brands. 

It’s early days for widgets, but widgets are only going to get more important, particularly as platforms become more important. There’s been a big growth in people using personalized home pages and aggregators to handle information on the internet, and widgets are a way into this. And desktops increasingly have widgets on them. So it’s clear that the distribution channels are all there. 

Developing a widget can be quite cheap to do. The actual building of it. Getting new ideas and then saving it and distributing the widget is more difficult. But there are some good examples of brands doing it very well. We’ve worked with UPS to distribute their widget, and why it works is it’s a genuinely useful product for people who are already using UPS. What’s interesting is that they’ve used it as the sort of centerpiece of their advertising. So their TV ads, their outdoor ads, their web advertising have all talked about the widget. It’s a nice piece of content to put in your advertising, it’s a nice story.

There’s an interesting curve in Russia in terms of percentage of people downloading podcasts. They’re just in the teens in Wave 1 and 2 and then suddenly jump up to close to 60% in Wave 3. 

Yeah, I know. It’s substantial. We’d be interested to see when we move to Wave 4, whether that was a real trend or blip. In the last year or so there’s been a lot more localization in terms of sites. Sites have grown up that are much more locally oriented in content. Also broadband is much more prolific than it was.

In the U.K. we see higher than average podcast usage because the mass, the TV channels, the radio stations have all got behind it and repackaged their content in podcasts. And that’s also been the case in Russia where mainstream media has started to dabble in social media with blogs and podcasts. The access to technology has improved and it’s easier to find podcasts than it was before.

Do you think podcasting is leaching off radio audiences, or is it creating its own space?

Because of the restrictions in licencing, podcasts don’t tend to cover music, particularly in Europe and the US. So podcasts really are, in the true spirit of social media, very much around very niche topics – stuff that you might not see fulfilled in major media. It’s bringing in a new audience, it’s promoting new types of presenters, new kind of formats. I wouldn’t say it’s big enough yet to be declining radio listening because radio and specifically music radio has a different purpose. But who knows? Over time if podcasts get more established and we get used to the idea of listening on demand, and we can get real music in podcasts, then it might start to impact.

I’m a big proponent of RSS and I’m always surprised that the adoption rates are so low. In Canada, your figures put it at about 18%. Do you expect to see a spike in that sometime in the future or is it a little too technical for mainstream?

[RSS adoption in] Canada is surprisingly low in our research. It has started to take off, but it’s very slow. I think the problem is that it’s really not very consumer-friendly yet. You know, it’s getting better. But it’s still quite complicated, a complex thing that people don’t really understand. But I think as RSS gets a bit simpler, gets used on mainstream media and they start to explain what it does, and RSS readers start to appear in more places – you can now put an RSS into Outlook, for example.  Things like that will help.

If you’re into social media and you read a lot of blogs, it makes sense to you. And I think as people consume more social media and they get used to not just visiting their favourite news sites and reading sections of that, they’re actually consuming from a large number of sites, they’ll find more of a need for it.

What about on the advertising side – how do you create order out of that chaos and how do you actually create a benefit?  Or can you?

Anything that helps aggregate and prioritize what’s interesting I think will do very well because people are just overwhelmed with the volume of content that’s out there – and you find that when you get on the Internet there’s so much content out there, you don’t really know where to go and what to look at. Anything that can help aggregate and sort this information will be very popular and these are the platforms advertisers should work with. I’ve seen pages where advertisers have sponsored aggregators or readers and things like that, and they’ve done well. Social news sites are a good example. Digg is a nice idea.

How do you keep track of trends? How do you know what questions to ask in the next survey, and how do you advise clients on how to spot the next trend?

I spend a lot of time online.  I read a huge number of blogs. A lot of blogs out there are people who are talking about the future of the web, talking about developments in the web, and these sites are creating invaluable information. And we look at the trend spotting sites – trendwatching.com is a great one. And we read the trade press, to see how it’s percolating to mainstream media. It’s just about consuming a huge amount of content and media, and not everyone’s going to have the time for this. One of the aspects of my role is to distribute information internally. The digital teams will all sift through a lot of stuff and they all spend a lot of time reading things as well. There is so much content out there and not all of it’s pertinent and relevant. But it’s a case of sifting it and making sense of it. And yeah, it’s just a lot of reading time really.

Can you tell us what to expect in Wave 4 in terms of numbers and when the document is going to be available?

We’re putting it together at the moment. We’ve got over 50 markets we want to be involved. So it’s getting bigger and bigger. We’re going to add the Middle East, South Africa, more markets in Latin America, some more markets in Europe. We’re covering a massive portion of the web. 

There are two aspects of research. We do the tracking, which is the Power to the People Social Media Tracker, and we’ll deliver a fourth wave of that to now look at blogging, social networking, RSS, podcasting, and see how that’s grown over time. And we’re also going to run an in-depth report that looks at the motivations and the “why” behind why people create content, why they join community and why they share content – trying to put some more explanation behind the trends basically. The social media tracking should be delivered in January and the in-depth report should be delivered in March – fingers crossed.

Given all of what we’re just talked about, how does an agency need to change to be able to better integrate campaigns across social media and traditional media?

That’s a big question. It invariably will impact the agency structure. Certainly as we see more and more content move onto the web, if we look forward 10, 15 years, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that the internet might be the primary delivery channel for most of your content, particularly television at home, newspapers, press, through readers and so forth.

It really elevates the need for a holistic view of communications. PR has got to be an integrated part of your thinking with what you do on the web. And it  depends on the client, but you’d really want an agency with one point of contact that can think across all of these disciplines, and think how your advertising really impacts on you reputation in social media, and think how your PR strategy will integrate with advertising.

Tom Smith’s role at Universal McCann is leading understanding into the changing nature of consumer behaviour, attitudes, consumption and opinions. His particular focus is the impact of the web, digital media and new technology. He runs a global digital research program called Wave, producing trend pieces, writing articles and providing analysis and insight for clients and agencies within the McCann network.